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Software Engineering Is a Dead-End Career, Says Bloomberg
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece at Bloomberg:
"Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35. Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills — such as the latest programming-language fad — or 'not suitable for entry level.' In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40. Employers have admitted this in unguarded moments. Craig Barrett, a former chief executive officer of Intel Corp., famously remarked that 'the half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years,' while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior."
I did a Masters Chemical Engineer (didn't finish), and a bachelor in CS. In both older students and alumni warned that you should get out of tech jobs and move into management within 10 years after graduation.
The first time I heard that must have been in the 1992-1994 timeframe
It's not like we make as much money as atheletes, so where do programmers go when they are 40?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
complete bullshit.
I'm under 35 too.
Damn, too slow.
I must be over 35...
Sound like that's because you should be able to graduate to a higher level software develpment role by then.
Really explains a lot about Facebook as well, actually!
Unless you are one of the recognized leaders of your field, you become "obsolete" to your employer after about 15 years even if your skills are not. Why keep a stubborn old programmer on board, when you can replace them with a younger less stubborn programmer at lower pay.
It's important to have an alternative career path. For example, I went to college for Computer Science, but have always been interested in computer security.
I took the computer programming skills I learned and put them to use in the computer security field instead.
I don't write code anymore, and I'm ok with that. Instead, I figure out what security issues others created in their code, without even having the source code in front of me.
Unfortunately, at least when I went to college, they never taught secure coding techniques. I had to learn all about that on my own.
Got my first software-development gig at 25. Been doing it full-time since then, and now I'm 58. Still going strong.
What are those Bloomberg assholes smoking?
you could say that about any professional career... I am sure doctors are pretty dead end too...
I guess unless you can hedge fund your way to making billions by exploiting millions... you are in a dead end career.
...it won't end well, now, will it?
People don't just magically stop having bills after 35, individuals are getting married and starting families later in life, and software / tech careers are becoming the linchpin of what's left of the American middle class.
Effectively cut them off from their career fields at such a pivotal point in their lives, en masse... see what you reap. You may not be doing much hiring of any kind when they're done shoving your dumb, pathologically stock-price-obsessed ass effectively out of society.
I'm on the other side of 45, and getting ready to start looking again in a few months, after being out of work for a few years. It's not going to be a fun time, but I have to believe I can do something other than make fries. Is this what I want to do long term? No, but I have to eat, as well as take care of some family; though thankfully not my own family.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Software engineering as a private sector job is fairly new in the grand scheme of things. Programmers that are 40+ years old probably aren't even all that common, certainly nowhere near as common as programmers younger than that. I am not so sure programmers starting today will face quite the same challenges having grown up in the midst of the technology revolution. Furthermore, in ANY job you probably will see the older workers doing much more management compared to younger workers. I don't get how this is supposed to be news. Sounds like pointless fear-mongering to me.
no facts, just an asshole opinion.
I think what they're really saying here is:
"Programmers in their 40s have wives, kids, and hobbies, and that means they won't put up with the 50-60 hour week bullshit we can get the 20-year-olds to eat." Also, they expect raises and vacation, and we just can't have that.
Work isn't your life. Work is what you do to pay for your life.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
So, around the new year Bloomberg the person was a champion for Codecademy, giving them some (imho deserved) press, and initiating conversations here on /. about how the world would be better off if more people knew how to code.
Now Bloomberg the media claims it's a terrible profession to go into.
I guess the world would be better if we all knew how to cook a nice, healthy, well rounded meal. Or how to change the oil on our cars. Or how to gut a fish. And, maybe we all shouldn't be trying to be chefs, mechanics, or fishing guides.
When I started I thought I had a point. I guess I don't. Coding is a great skill to have, and as a champion for liberal arts education, I believe many things make us well rounded, better thinkers, and more productive than narrowly doing only that for which we hope to get paid. It seems to me that there should be enough work to go around (every jackass has an app idea they can't write), and ageism seems a little... simplistic. Experience does have rewards, doesn't it?
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Don't they mostly cater to the financial industry? Pretty much a dead zone now isnt it?
Is it hard to imagine why even a forward thinking youth doesn't want to bother with STEM education when the STEM career field comes off like this?
As for Zuck? He's a web developer who was at the right place in the right time. What does he know about real engineering?
First, the jobs move overseas and we get told it's a "good thing":
http://blog.douweosinga.com/2003/10/why-jobs-moving-overseas-isn-so-bad.html
Then, there is complaining that the industry can't find any programmers:
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/05/23/tech-talent-shortage-one-of-this-years-major-storylines-illustrated-in-national-study-by-job-search-site-dice/
Next, the industry tries to figure out where all the programmers went:
http://www.google.com/search?q=shortage+of+programmers
Finally, they realize they've castrated themselves and simply claim it's a dead-end career. Nice.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
TFA points out that it takes *longer* for the older programmer to find the job. This has nothing to do with how many older guys are out there.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
I spent over 15 years of my life as an electrical engineer before I decided to make a career transition into application software development. I went back to school for a mscs and recently got my first entry-level software engineer position, 4 months before (and 4 credits shy) of graduation. I did it at age 41. That flies in the face of the Bloomberg schmuck's article.
Yeah they're better at working 16 hours a day.
and fan-out paper.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior.
"Willing to put up with abuse" does not mean "superior", however much employers might like to conflate them.
As I approach the FP's end-of-career age, I find myself far, far more efficient than a decade ago, in not just my coding-for-coding's-sake work, but in my ability to address what the business wants out of my code. The beancounters don't care about skinnability, about what buzzword technologies went into the app, about how fast (beyond a very loose "fast enough") a program runs. They care if it answers their questions, and does so accurately.
Unfortunately, they can't easily see past how much I cost - Yes, at this point in my career, I make in the ballpark of twice as much as an entry level dev. And yes, I do provide that much more value to the company than I did fresh out of college (I'd even go so far as to say I provide far more than merely 2x the ROI, but will stay on the conservative side for now).
Important point to note about the FP... It talks about Intel and Facebook; TFA additionally mentions Microsoft - All companies that do tech for tech's sake, not as a means to satisfy a non-tech-related business need. Your time in Silicon Valley, your chance to strike gold in a startup, your 60 hour weeks and the glares for cutting out early when you need to attend Grandma's funeral, may all end by 40. But your career doesn't need to, as long as you've spent those first 15-20 years picking up the skills that matter outside the tech hubs.
"Programmers that are 40+ years old probably aren't even all that common"
Are you on crack?? The Apple ][+ was released in 1979 and people started commercial programming (for the home user) around this time. Don't even get me started on those old Cobol programmers. Get back to dragging widgets around your VBasic app sonny!!
Yep, that's why my tool uses 6 different programming languages (all running under Window XP)
Just to keep management and new hires confuses for years to come.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior
And his great achievement as a programmer, that gives him the right to judge programming abilities, is ...?
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Or Norman Matloff, in an op-ed on bloomberg.com, says?
Say what? I started programming in the mid '70's. There were already "software engineers" and "computer scientists" back then. Computers were around long before "personal computers" and needed programming.
The only way I get work as a programmer now is as an consultant. It is not because I haven't kept up with tech, languages and tools. Around 10 years old head hunters started telling me it would be easier to find work for for me if I rewrote my resume to hide my true age and years of experience.
The majority of my clients are through referrals, they've never seen me in person and have no idea how old I am.
Maybe I'm outside the norm, but I had two different offers the last time I looked for a new job (6 months ago), despite moving from another state and being just shy of 40. Of course, I keep up with new tech and had an app in the Android market, so maybe I seem young.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
So when you are mature enough to stop programming like an asshole, it's time to move into management. Where you treat people like assholes until you are mature enough to retire. Maybe get a teaching degree and work part time with children. Since you had such much prior experience managing child-like programmers?
Worked in the industry for 37 years for 7 corporate owners but never in the same role for more than about 4 years, flitting back and forth between hard core tech and management and then back to tech etc. Everything from hardware interface to web applications, software packaging, teaching, customer support, corporate decision teams, product management, cost estimation, mainframe, mini, PC. What I think I had going for me was that I was viewed as flexible, non-dogmatic, willing to work on what senior management needed. Learned something in every job and it wasn't always the language of the day.
This article would be more credible if the author weren't Norm Matloff, a statistics prof who's been bemoaning the invasion of H1Bs into the software business for over a decade. Now that the demand for cheap labor has left the building, I guess he's turned to stomping sour grapes, "You shouldn't have wanted the job anyway".
This is going to sound "ageist" but ... the only advantage young programmers have is that they're willing to work 20 hour days and 7 day weeks for months at a time. And do it for less money.
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
So you need about 10,000 hours of working in a field to become an "expert". If you believe that article (and I do). And someone who is an "expert" has, hopefully, seen enough mistakes and errors over those 10,000 hours to be able to head them off when they show up again.
That's what you're paying for when you hire the experienced programmers. The knowledge of what errors people usually make and why they make them.
So you get code with fewer errors and fewer re-writes to take out the errors that never got in in the first place.
Funny how every time I say the same thing I get an argument, or more likely, some putz who says that "where they work" there are "lots" of older workers!
But the problem is that to the 12 year old who is trolling, people over 30 look old, where to me they look like kids!
I kind of think this article vindicates my position.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I took over as a developer on a project lead by a "hot young developer" (how the management saw his skill set). He and I graduated around the same time. Guess what? Dude didn't even know what primary or foreign keys were. He also had no defaults, not null or unique constraints. Most of his code was a steaming pile of dog crap expressed crudely in Java. When I got on the project and saw the code, my eyes felt like they were on fire it was that bad.
But hey, he's got the "latest skills" right?
Repeat the same story with PHP, Python or Ruby replacing Java and you get a snapshot of where this leads.
Yeah, I'm over 40, and my father was a software guy before me (still working for Adobe).
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
and when they need to rehire the people with old skills that the new people don't have or they don't know how that old system that is in place works then they some times have to pay X2-5 there old pay to get them back to get the older stuff working.
As a study that was linked to right here on Slashdot not long ago shows, ageism in software development is nothing more than arrogant bullshit.
And Zuckerberg is nothing more than a PHP script kiddie who both got lucky and cheated others to achieve his success. His word is hardly to be taken seriously.
a bachelor’s degree in CS does not tech you to code but a tech school or own your own does.
CS is loaded with theory and lacking in skills.
The article states that senior software engineers price themselves out of the market. This implies that they are turning down high-income development jobs because they can make even more elsewhere - but where? Sales? IT? Freelance consulting? They can't all become managers. Anyone have a good feel on what careers developers tend to age into?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Subject says it all.
Contact me if you want to see my resume.
Interviews have been coming at a steady rate so far, and in one shop I'd be one of the younger people if hired.
In Liberty, Rene
I think all of this depends on the industries. In certain industries, banking, government, etc. "old" programmers are very much in demand. Why, because these industries value consistency, tradition and the like. In new industries, that change overnight, it is out with the old and in with the new.
When I was the DP manager for a large government agency, we found that taking employees who understood the business aspects of the agency and training them to program was much more effective than hiring programmers and teaching them the business. I haven't seen any data to suggest the same wouldn't be true in the private sector.
I think of software engineering as being a higher level funtion than computer programming. a code mokey might get hired as a computer programmer, but then grows into a software engineer...
In his book ("iWoz") - Woz tells a story where "when he was young" he was able to lock himself in a room for a week and come out with a completed project. As he aged he found that he lost that ability/motivation (and he could just pay someone to write the code)
regarding Zuckerberg's comment, that guy who used to run Microsoft (Bill Gates I think) basically said the same thing - i.e. young minds have better/more ideas (read "Breaking Windows" to see when Bill Gates hit that wall).
anyway, the human brain changes as we age - which may not be "fair" but ... ummm, what was I saying...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Who the hell has a software job for 15 years? I've been doing development full-time since 1979, and the longest gig I've had was for three years. A few I would have liked to last longer, but not many. Something always changes to make the job I liked not so attractive any more, and I start looking again. Rarely have trouble finding the next one.
"(Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are his own.)"
Ya know, If I was a prof of CS at UCD, I'd probably think my upward mobility was limited too. I interview fresh college grads and senior professionals alike in my software company. I, personally, am equally likely to pick either. Age isn't as much of a metric for ability as ability is. 20somethings have lots of energy. 50somethings have lots of experience. A good team needs both.
Facebook is an experiment. It's unclear how successful they will be as a company. I do know people that work there and youth is a highly regarded trait.
MSFT is a failed experiment. A company like that is where talent goes to die, in my opinion.
Which could mean that a young person will stupidly take the first job offered while an older person will wisely shop around? Or maybe that an older person has stricter job requirements (such as not moving, good school district, spouse's job, etc, etc.) which inherently make it more difficult to find a job irrespective of age.
Don't blame the bean counters. In my experience, they were always questioning why IT wanted to keep hiring outside consultants instead of using existing staff? It is the IT management that makes the decisions on who to hire and fire, not the accounting staff.
Don't get me wrong. Bean counters may say that IT is spending too much. But it is IT management that decides the current crop of engineers can't cut it and isn't worth training on new technologies.
I'm near 40 and feel like I'm generally more employable now than I was when I exited university. That said, as to the over/under predicament, it seems like there are very few "entry level" positions advertised. Nobody wants a "junior software developer"; they want "senior software developers". Maybe it's because I've primarily worked for small companies and startups. That said, I don't feel like these "senior developer" positions are that much more demanding or complex than the stuff I did when I was, in fact, a "junior developer".
One comment on work/life balance: I've never been expected to work more than 8 hours a day, ever, for any extended period of time. Have I had to work late nights when there was a deadline or a release? Sure. I've worked over some weekends, but very few. Then again, I don't work in the gaming industry and I'm not located in northern California. Maybe that makes the difference.
TFA points out that it takes *longer* for the older programmer to find the job. This has nothing to do with how many older guys are out there.
It takes longer for most older people to find jobs. It has nothing to do with being a programmer or not.
I personally am starting to suspect that a little grain of truth is in there.
While I'm pretty sure that inside the field age, among software developers and engineers discrimination towards different age-groups is near non-existant and any claim to the contrary is mostly hysteria, I'm beginning to suspect there might be a hidded sort-of age discrimination at intersections with other fields not related to out nerdy fields of expertise such as HR and Management.
I've sent in my resume to job descriptions that fit my skillset as if it were written with me in mind and recieved answers such as 'you are overqualified' while at the same time suspect in more than one instance that it would be damaging to apply for a lesser position at other gigs, simply because people would become suspicious of why I'm applying this low at my age and with the project portfolio I have.
Companies, especially recruiters and b2b contractor shops, want fresh graduates with an academic degree that they can pay low and sell high for the shittiest of non-rewarding dead-end jobs. They certainly do not want seasoned developers that smell a rotten project 10 kilometers against the wind. They want young, cheap people who can start being productive on a dime in a very specific field of expertise and they don't want to pay more than 40K Euros/Year for them. That's a fact for many shops in our very vivid and un-traditional field.
I'm in my early 40ies with 25 years of progamming under my belt and up to almost any development job you'd throw at me, but the usual barrier of getting that across to the beancounters who know zilch about computers gets another one added which is what I presume to be an intimidating self confidence in my skills as a seasoned developer. This actually *is* a solid disadvantage if you insist in staying in regular software development.
However, there's an upside to it, which is a notably stupid yet simple age cliche which I like to call the 'Grey Hair Bonus'. It's for this very that I have in recent years pondered and finally decided to invest my next extra cash not in the newest hardware but something I've never owned before: A business suit, a set of business shirts and some ties. ... I'm pretty sure it's for the first time ever that today I'm sitting at my desk coding while wearing a shirt.
If all else fails I'll move further away from the keyboard and stronger into CR and consulting. And I'll up my rates according to the pain I endure. Most people are dumb that way and ask for nothing else, although I'd really rather continue coding for lesser pay. Coding will either become a hobby of mine or a part-time end-customer product building of some sort.
Bottom line: General society - which, lets face it, is mostly made up of people dumber than you if you are a developer - asks for grey-haired seniors to be wearing ties, talking smart and asking insane rates for long-winded papers, analysis, software contract consulting and whatnot. Not grey-haired coders. Might as well give it to them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and yet 50-60 hour weeks lead to more errors and poorer quality work.
What the point of pulling long hours when you use a lot of time fixing errors that if you only did 40 hours would not be made.
And whatever Zuckerberg says can probably be ignored, because you just know he's the type that, when he's getting on a bit, will be saying that age and experience are what counts.
Zuckerberg runs a big company. He might have spent a few years coding, but he isn't a programmer anymore. I doubt that he put in enough time and sweat behind a compiler to be anything more than a clever amateur, so his opinion on the topic counts for zero. So basically, you have a college kid's level of experience in computer science making sweeping statements about who is and isn't a skilled expert in the field.
Once he is an expert in the field of software engineering, I will listen to what he has to say on the topic. Looking at the quality of his software, it is pretty obvious what dismissing experience gets you.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If they want a newbie that knows a lot of abstract book-learnin and bangs his head against the wall for a week on a problem that I can solve in 10 minutes let them continue the illusion that they are saving money.
I will be over here doing great work, advocating the high value practices of the industry, and getting higher and higher salaries from smart employers.
For that matter, forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.
We have 2 types of coders. The over 40 types, that decide how it's going to be written, what it's going to be written in, and who's going to write what.
Then we have the under 30 staff... they're right out of college... are hired as interns... work all day and night till the project is done and then move on. If they know anything BESIDES coding, they get hired. We get people in here that are fluent in 5+ languages but can't figure out how to use Outlook. I'm not kidding.
Knowing a few programming languages is easy. Knowing how to do things like tell the most powerful executives in the company that their idea is stupid without insulting them is a skill that gets you hired. If all you know how to do is code, quit while you're ahead.
Certainly newer programmers are more likely to have some experience in current technology and not have ingrained habits based on excessive speculation in now-outdated technologies. And its a lot easier at a glance at a resume to measure "newer programmer" than to measure flexibility and adaptability.
So, there's probably lots of not-great programmers that are going to be useful shortly after they get out of school, get more useful as they get used to actually working in industry and get to know approaches that are useful with the way industry is at the time, but then will reach a point where their approaches are set in stone, and they adapt poorly to new technologies.
The really good programmers will keep getting better as long as they are working -- barring failing mental faculties from disease or injury -- but they're a minority of programmers to start with, and identifying them takes evaluation on more than "years of experience" and other similarly simplistic metrics -- which most of the people evaluating prospective programmers probably aren't competent to do.
So, if you are a really good programmer, you probably need to identify some other really good programmers (and other good people in whatever fields you need) and get out, with them, from under the thumb of less-good management before too long in industry.
Theoretically, word gets out...kids stop wasting money on college education that won't last till they break even on their student loans...companies grudgingly have to hire the old farts who had trouble finding work when their were so many recent grads...CS is no longer a dead-end career.
It isn't just programmers. If you owned a company with a lot of brick layers and a job opened up you would expect a 25 year old to lay more bricks per hour and have less sick time as well. Plus he probably has not earned high end wages for his trade and is eager to make his mark. A 38 year old brick layer may have some bitterness as he is aware of how companies led him down the garden path, he is at top wages and can't get promoted, and he is slowing down a bit especially in hot or cold weather and now has more sick days. Companies need to fire workers at the four year mark as federal pension laws start at the fifth year and at that point you have to pay them more than a new guy. We have a sick system.
I've interviewed at companies with a 20-something workforce and it is very awkward. They make it very clear, they only want older employees if they are in the top 5% of the workforce. You have to be a well-known expert (e.g. owing a github project with a large following, published and selling well in the app store, highly ranked on stackoverflow) to have their respect. It doesn't matter if I like that or not; the 20-something people make the decisions. It is evolve and get facebook like jobs or die at a boring company.
My solution, which isn't easy, is to start my own company. I think the 20-something crowd feels that it is so easy to start a company, if a 35+ year-old employee hasn't started one then there must be something wrong. It is a lot like high-school; you have to be hard to get for them to want you.
I'm in a project with younger programmers. They're running sql updates in production without testing in dev (and destroying data...). They're failing to check stuff into source control and yelling about old files making it into environments. They're butchering timelines with poor estimates of effort. I don't think all younger programmers are like this, but the more of them there are, they're helping guarantee my relevance. Aging Hack
Personally I believe the bigger issue is the pressure offshoring has put on the market.
The jobs that used to be handled by junior programmers are now offloaded to offshore service providers. So the junior programmers, who just happen to have played with the latest toys and tools while we were busy writing useful code with the previous generation of tools, are readily available at a cut throat price.
So the work that used to be handled by the intermediate programmers now gets passed off to the new grads who used to be the juniors. In the meantime, the intermediate programmers are now ready and willing to undercut the senior programmers for their former job of designing systems and collecting requirements. Sure they don't have the experience of the senior programmers, but they're cheaper, so they get the job.
Which leaves the senior programmers on the short end of the stick. Thanks not only to the pressure of offshoring but the increased use of effective template-based designs, tooling, and frameworks that put to shame older tools like CORBA, and suddenly the only experience the senior programmer has that's actually relevant is their business experience.
Their degree is out of date. Their tools are matured with a wide range of skillsets available for reasonable or cheap prices.
But one thing experience teaches you that nothing else can is an intuitive grasp of how the frameworks and tools function and what they are probably doing inside all that obfuscated and hidden code. Because we used to have to write the code the frameworks implement by hand.
Unfortunately, despite the speed with which senior developers can debug problems thanks to their intuitive grasp of "the machine", there just aren't enough "tough" debugging problems to justify keeping them around in anything but the largest of teams and companies.
Still, senior developers can find work. If they're willing to retool, retrain, move, and take a pay cut that may well mean they're making less in real, spendable dollars than they did twenty years ago. And if they're real, real lucky.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Is this an American thing? I live in northern Europe, and most programmers at my employer or others I know of are well above 35. The only category where the below-30s dominate is the most basic codemonkey level.
On the other hand, I also know very senior people who due to the sheer weight of their achievements are considered indispensible. In one instance, a guy sitting across me who is close to retiring had planned on someone younger to own the code for a project. But it turned out that the new guy wasn't even up to the task of making basic modifications let alone huge enhancements to the code. The senior guy now has postponed his retirement until someone else is ready to takeover. An organization cannot be homogeneous and expect to succeed. It needs to draw talent from all demographic levels for sustained long-term success. These are my observations as someone who has been out of school only in the last 5 years.
I didn't say the jobs didn't exist. My point was the field is FAIRLY new, and as such is still defining itself. I think its hard to argue that software engineering was anywhere near as popular a career in the 70s as it is today.
And then all these companies complain they can't enough people! Meaning they cant get enough 22 year olds who sit at their desks eating Snickers and churning out crap code.
Programmers that are 40+ years old probably aren't even all that common...
You need to get out more. If you find a company that's been around for more than 10 years you will find it has lots of people who are no longer in their 20s.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I'm 43 and a very successful software engineer. I have constant job offers to boot. If you're good at what you do, and you do a good job, you'll be fine.
It's not as dead end as writing for a newspaper!
Just what we need with the new current crazy complexity, an excuse for an abdication of responsibility, autocoding, new code/tools,ignorance and arrogance - a heady mix. Thats really attractive to us women. Software teams didn't use to care what you looked like,if you went to uni, or how old you were, this stuff is corporate speak. It will take more than one lifetime eg.100yearproject to explain the meaning of what we're going to be coding up next, its not just about 24hr coding its about collecting micro-contributions from non-corporate people who know stuff, so lets get over the mid-life crisis we need everyone on board, including grandma.
My first job involved fixing the errors of my boss who tended to work until about 2am, commit a pile of utter garbage, then come in about 2pm the next day and start all over again. Yes, I did get asked why I couldn't be more like him.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
+1 "God I hope you're right" and another +1 "May they be first against the wall when the revolution comes"...
OK, I'm 62 and still going strong. I'm up to date on my skills and respected by my (much younger) colleagues.
You must still have a full head of hair.
But I have known people in their 40's with good backgrounds who couldn't find work in the field.
Most likely because they were all prematurely bald from all the stress of working those 20-hours days for weeks on end, back when they were in their 20's.
It takes longer for most older people to find jobs. It has nothing to do with being a programmer or not.
Exactly. I have often seen it quoted that for every 10K extra in salary you would expect to make, you should add an extra month to your job search/time without work in case of a layoff. Generally, a 35 year old expects to make more than a 25 year old. It stands to reason that it would take a little longer to find a job.
Most older developers I have seen chose to leave the field, they are not forced out. A lot of the older developers didn't study any computer science because it wasn't mature in their time so they have trouble adapting as technology changes. This leads to a large subset that don't keep up their skills so when they get laid off they struggle. If they stay up date and still have energy and enthusiasm they will be welcomed with open arms.
I'm at one of those companies. In my 30s, I'm one of the younger folks. Older software companies are where you're apt to find a lot more stability and reasonable working hours, perhaps at the expense of a gaudy starting salary.
Just what we need with the new current crazy complexity, an excuse for an abdication of responsibility, autocoding, new code/tools,ignorance and arrogance - a heady mix. Thats really attractive to us women. Software teams didn't use to care what you looked like,if you went to uni, or how old you were, this stuff is corporate speak. It will take more than one lifetime eg.100yearproject to explain the meaning of what we're going to be coding up next, its not just about 24hr coding its about collecting micro-contributions from non-corporate people who know stuff, so lets get over the mid-life crisis we need everyone on board, including grandma.
Ever see anyone start programming at 50?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Most of the older women in the field that my wife has worked with are like that. She has come home with more than her fair share of bitter grumblings about having to work twice as hard because some affirmative action quota didn't realize, for example (yes, this is a real example), that using a tab panel with the tab headers pushed above the user's viewable area in the container to simulate a card layout is an amateurish hack at best and inexcusable from a "senior software engineer" who claims to have used .NET since day one.
Having seen her frustration with this, I am always left with a little bit of anger when I see the articles lamenting the dearth of women in the field. What we do to the women who by nature want to be here and compete fairly without changing the culture of the field is completely dishonorable.
If you have skills and lack theory then you're going to be one of those who can't get hired after age 30. Any monkey can do the common entry level coding jobs. I've found that tech school people have the toughest time adapting to changing technologies, or even adapting to unexpected problems that crop up. Thinking abstractly is an essential programming and engineering skill, if you disagree than maybe you're only a coder.
Its created by people without a lot of experience! Young programmers are very much inferior from my experience.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Recompiling with GCC on apple? PRICELESS!
You keep chasing new tech, buggy tech, incomplete tech, cool tech, trendy tech. I'll keep refining, refactoring, simplifying, optimizing and documenting code that's been breathing, evolving, improving for over 30 years now.
The internet is written is C, the tool you think is new and great and wonderful is written in C.
I thread, I fork, I multitask, I cluster and GUI and tweet and socialize, and I do it all faster, cleaner and better than you do it. In less time.
I don't write code with bugs. Why?
C is the most complete language, the most mature language, the smallest, the fastest the bestest. It does everything. All the tools are in it's toolbox. If it can be done, it can be done is C. Your tool runs out of steam at some point and has bugs at every point.
Either you code in C or you are in denial.
Proper C code, written by a proper C master gets better and better.
C code does not need to be written when some snarky rewrites the world because he is bored and his newest gift to the world is an incomprehensible ball of spagetti and he cannot resist the immature urge to start again from scratch.
Some day son, the Ancient Wizard invite you into the inner sanctum and will show you what you cannot even dream about.
But you are not ready yet. Grasshopper.
It's simply not true that middle-aged developers have a hard time finding work due to rampant ageism. If you have advanced skills building high-quality software with technologies that are in demand, your age hardly matters. The smart employers value engineers with years of experience who are more likely to create good products and not make costly mistakes. I've been working for almost 20 years as a professional developer, am now 41 and making the best money of my career developing financial tools for a major investment bank.
Development teams doing high-profile projects that get media attention (as opposed to boring, routine stuff like telecom databases, retail POS terminals, embedded SW for consumer devices, etc) do tend to have more developers who are in their mid-30s or younger. This is generally not because of age bias, it's more likely because younger developers are most familiar with the latest languages and tools. Startups also tend to have young developers since they are more OK with high risk/high reward deals and long hours, and haven't had as much opportunity to get into engineering careers with big companies. Also, after a few decades in the field, many developers eventually get tired of endlessly staring at computer screens and learning new skills every 5-10 years. They move up into management or start new careers. A well-educated, hard-working engineer can easily move into many other less demanding career tracks including finance/investing, marketing, HR, real estate, and non-technical corporate jobs.
I still like programming, but a lot of people I know have moved on to something different after a while: network engineer, DBA, one guy even became a lawyer (he sues himself for patents now). Smart people get bored with doing the same thing. I think that's at least part of it
His point wasn't that they didn't exist, but that the quantity was smaller. And since PCs didn't exist (for all intents and purposes) in the 70s, let alone smart phones and programmable appliances, his point is probably correct. With the explosion of hardware, it logically follows that there are more people to program them, unless you're arguing that there was a glut of software developers back in the 60s and 70s working 2-man projects with a gaggle of developers writing KLOCs of NOOPs.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Merged bump report on trunk.
Fixed Entity switching issue
Career is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a person's "course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)".
It can also pertain to an occupation or a profession that usually involves special training or formal education,[1] and is considered to be a person’s lifework.
The word career conjures up a certain romanticism about one's ability to make/build/contribute something to society. As software engineers and as any other skilled professional (that requires
using a craft to make a living) we live and breathe that ability to make/build/contribute to society.
What making/building/contributing Manager's do? Beside's it's a lot easier when I appear for my son's classroom "bring your dad to school day" and we have to introduce our professions. I write "software" sounds much better than "I forward emails and chase people to do things".
Yeah - I'd find the prospect of hiring a 10 yr old a bit of a leap as well.
Speaking as an old guy (53) still making a living at it (in Seattle, no less) I can confirm the age bias and job market problems. I'm doing totally trendy stuff, I'm at the top of my game but I hear with regularity "you're overqualified" i.e. I want (no, need) too much money. And yes, H1-Bs and younger devs are eating our collective lunch. But those of us feeling this anxiety would do well to stop for a moment and examine our assumptions:
1) We tend to think we should be paid and paid well cause we're good at this and provide value. Wrong. We (devs) are a commodity. That's it. It's supply and demand and there's way cheaper to be had than my 50+ ass. I'm good. So what? Look around you. "Sucks" is good enough. No, really it is.
2) We think we're special cause we're smart. We're not that smart. Techies are kinda stupid in some very important ways (like thinking that they should get paid for being good at something). And we're definitely not special. We're just middle class, and the middle class has fallen down and can't seem to get up again. Got your double-wide paid off?
My kid want's to go into engineering. Breaks my heart. Trying to discourage him gently, but what should I suggest instead?
If you're 40 and you haven't become a manager yet maybe it's time to move into another career field anyways.
Geez, the rate at which Wall St. chews out CEOs, I think it should be software engineers wondering about the half life of CEOs?. Can they even barely last a quarterly report?
When we started our professional careers, we picked up whatever was in demand / the current fad and often stuck with it (because we earned a living with it all these years and had no time nor pressure to pick up new fads). Young programmers who start now will pick up the current fad and specialize in it. That's all there is to it. The "50-60 hours vs. wife and kids" issue is overrated, not everyone has wife and kids or issues with 50-60 hours (try entrepreneurship). Those who have been unemployed for a while and not been able to learn current technologies during that time, are simply slacking (you'll find enough of those in any field I believe).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I've been in IT for 33 years, mostly as a zOS Systems Programmer, never in any management position but I do direct my team in a technical direction. Good assembler programers are oh so valuable, since it’s a nearly dead art, but when it’s needed, it’s needed.
I find it "funny" being dismissed for a job on the basis of overqualifications... IMHO there's no such thing as overqualifications. This excuse is just a reason for companies not hiring someone.
In my country (Portugal) this is a most frequent excuse for not hiring. The other excuse is aging. It's true that after 35 it is more difficult to get a new job. My personal experience says so... I'm 37 and I've been unemployed for the last 4 months. Fortunately I got a job in a company that I worked for in the past, because the person in charge knew me very well and did not need any job interview to know me better...
That's the movie. In the book, there was a sanctuary and it was a space station near jupiter.
Yeah, but the book didn't have a 24 year old Jenny Agutter wearing nothing but a flimsy little green piece of see-thru green chiffon as a sarong with nothing on underneath it, and a silver choker necklace with an Ankh charm.
You young kids of today have no idea what that was like for a 14 yr old boy in 1976 to see that on the big screen. And yes, the movie showed her nekkid breasts and ass in 1976. I was completely smitten in love with her for at least a year. She's even aged pretty nicely, at 60 too. I'd still tap that ;-)
Now get off my lawn.
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]" - wikipedia
Exploitive management wants people they can manipulate and take advantage of - that's why they like kids.
All I see written by kids is a bunch of insecure PHP web sites with obvious errors and Java projects trying to reinvent the wheel that are always over budget and never finished.
It wasn't kids that designed your CPU, GPU, compiler or OS.
It wasn't kids that took us to the moon or developed nuclear power.
The best thing you can do in any technical field is find an older mentor. All old people were young but young people haven't been old yet. Do you know that Java project you've been working on for a month? You can do it in 2 shell commands.
The other issue is that software can have a very high return and most programmers have relatively low consumption lifestyles so most of the best programmers own a biz or enough equity or before they are 40 that they don't have to work bad jobs. Compare that to the average management fool that spends every penny he makes and goes into debt to get a 2nd house and a 3rd wife. He'll be working until the day he dies.
1st: I see different here (Software Engineer being a TOP JOB CURRENTLY) -> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577336603334928584.html
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"It's also one of the reasons why software engineer was ranked No. 1 in a list of the best jobs of 2012 by http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated; "
---
Second: You only get STRONGER the more you code!
Experience is EVERYTHING...
I.E.-> I'd hire a 20++ yr. man over some "fresh outta academia" noob, anytime. Especially IF I wanted "quality work"... they're worth their weight in GOLD (and you get more "bang for the buck" from them, than say, the CIO generally).
Why?
Ok, practical example from my own life recently enough (the past year):
Last year, I tried Python & within a couple weeks I had most of what I needed to do in it down pat, for text manipulations... only way I could DO that was to have experience in programming in general!
(Python's an up & coming 'new' language, vs. say, my favs. in Object Pascal, C/C++, or Visual Basic & .NET variants thereof (VB.NET &/or C#))
JAVA too (reminds me of C# actually, or even C++ to a good extent except everything needs to be an object & set into memory 1st)...
Which I even took coursework in to "brush up my skillset"... I didn't study one BIT, and aced the course!
Was easy, once I knew C++ beforehand especially.
How?
Once you program in the Object.Property Method paradigm, they're ALL PRETTY MUCH THE SAME!
(It's the CONCEPTS you learn over time, via academia, & work, that matter most!)
* You learn techniques - & once you do? You ask yourself:
"I know how to do this problem, using this technique in (insert language here), now it's just a matter of syntax in this other language"
Put it this way:
I used to make extra monies porting various toolkits written in VB, Pascal/Delphi, or C/C++ variants because of what I just said above, porting them to OTHER LANGUAGES, was easy money!
(SO... once you know one pretty well (especially Pascal/Delphi or C++)? You pretty much know them all... & where it matters - in concepts!)
If you can "port" code from language-to-language? You KNOW what I am saying...
APK
P.S.=> THAT ONLY COMES WITH REAL-WORLD HANDS ON EXPERIENCE FOR YEARS... not from academia!
Man - This is an "old ploy" used by HR departments to underpay seasoned pros (who must be desperate for a job) & to hire on CHEAPLY PAID "noobs" outta academia... period!
... apk
unnecessary cost. ... a major incident
I don't think mission critical software industry has the same
job market.
Probably some of you will argue that responsability will
skyrocket software price and that is true, but today
our entire life depend on software
it's just few second away from midnight in term of 'doomsday clock'.
Old software engineers suck dude. BTW: I have a picture sharing site fore sale. I'd be willing to let go of it for a cool billion. Chillaxing in Silicon Valley.
Anything else is crude and clumsy. All other tools lack the power, the portability, the speed, the accuracy, the razor edge.
Those whose complain of C expose themselves as not worthy, as poseurs, as wannabes. .
You cannot buy Mastery of C. There is no logo or club. It takes hard work, pure thought, and a focus on what is, not what I wish.
There is a secret handshake. But C masters can recognize each other on sight.
We're the ones with all the chicks and all the money.
We would meet, but we are having too much fun ruling the world.
I took a course at DeVry to certify as Bag Changer on a Prairie Dog Vacuum.
Google Norman Matloff and you will see a ton of articles and blogs on cheap tech labor by Dr.Matloff. Immigration and cheap tech labor has been one of Dr. Matloff's talking points for a long time and this article circles around that core issue.
Young cheap labor makes more experienced expensive labor redundant in the software industry. Dr. Matloff has decided to become the grim reaper of CS & software engineering. When was the last time you heard a high school football coach discouraging his students from aspiring for the NFL? As a professort of CS he should be
championing CS and software engineering. Oh well.. to each his own..
and the Wadhwa fella is notorious for hiring H-1Bs, so yes he is definetly going to endorse cheap ypung labor..
forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.
It will certainly get you ahead in the contest for needlessly long, verbose code....
I'll wipe better code out of my ass than you young guys. Real software engineering just confuses you. I know. I've had to put up with enough of you straight out of college. For the first year, you are completely fucking worthless, because you think your skills are so 'leet that you are not willing to learn. When I finally beat the Java/Ruby/Python Brain Fart out you, then you start to learn.
Young mathematicians that died young, in the past, made some of the most surprising and stunning discoveries. So, the unwritten joke goes "as a mathematician, if you live past 40 then you've contributed nothing amazing." (But, that's not actually taken seriously.)
Examples include Ramanujan and Galois (crap, can't think of any others).
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
That's it. It's not that there is a shortage, it's that there are qualified candidates that can't get hired due to ageism.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
My point being that is is not "pointless fear-mongering." Age discrimination in software engineering is a fact. Although I believe it has less to do specifically with age or experience and more to do with the general race-to-the-bottom in all businesses; cutting corners, outsourcing, robbing people of pensions they paid for, phasing out medical coverage, dumping older employees to save on payroll and insurance, etc.
http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/10/young-persons-game.html
I note that almost all the people commenting there are still working in the field, many are now respected Oracle Aces and Bloggers.
Oracle and unix guy.
I'm a member of the > 40 set with 22 years of professional software development experience and i reject the universal notion of aging into technical decline. in my opinion, personal expectations of increasing salary and decreasing workload are an automatic psychological consequence of humans expecting more respect and higher position with age. however, constantly-maintained technical skills and an evolving technical and business philosophy are not automatic. they require considerable personal investment and vigilance. the harsh reality of garbage in equalling garbage out applies nicely to career paths. this article is trying to find an alternate explanation allowing those older engineers who have not properly invested in their own careers to feel good about decreasing desirability in the job market. most engineers accept responsibility for investing effort to earn a technical degree and a bit more to learn how to apply it in business. the problem with so many people is that they expect that effort to be finite over time. before you blame your predicament on some factor outside of your control, consider the possibility that you might be entirely responsible for getting into your current position and what you should be doing to get out if you don't like it.
Tech support sucks balls, as well.
Systems admin, network engineering, virtualization consulting. I do them all, and it blows.
Gone are the days of raises, appreciation, balanced life and being treated like a professional. If you're still in it, it is a race to the bottom.
Office Space. Every day at work is the worst day of my life.
var y = 'y'
var e = 'e'
var a = 'a'
var h = 'h'
printf(y);
printf(e);
printf(a);
printf(h);
It justifies Bloomberg the companies treatment of staff. I know, used to work for them got out while I was still young to not be institutionalised, still know plenty of people who work there, some my age, some younger. BB likes to get them young, promise everything, and throw them away. Rather than fire people, they move their seniors into more and more humilating roles, effectively forcing the people to resign.
I hear it's worse mow Sekunda's back.
By all means take a job with them to get some experience with financial, they used to offer a lot of training, I don't know if they still do, but do not stay for any more than two years, regardless of your future certs (their "bonus" scheme). You'll earn more for longer in a real financial company.
Two years ago (age 39) I needed to find a new job. I've been doing a lot of web development with Javascript, jQuery, Grails on the backend, etc. Within a week I had a dozen interviews lined up. Within two weeks I had five very good offers. I took the one with the $140,000 salary, $5000/year training budget, five weeks paid time off, and many other awesome benefits. Boomberg can go suck it. ;-)
desktop stuff. I'm pretty much the head software guy for everything -- I get
the hard stuff the younger guys can't figure out. Plus I got to learn a whole
new application area this year. The only problem is I'm getting to be
a bit of a bottleneck because I take on a lot because I can't stand the
quality that many (not all!) of the younger guys churn out.
I make enough to put 2 kids through college on my own, and It's still a
whole lot of fun.
He is a very influential employer of programmers, in terms of numbers he employs and the likelihood that similarly clueless but also influential people will listen to him.
and I'm interested in this post but can't be bothered since /. is a dinosaur for old people and Mark is asking for a new hole in fb privacy to help him make more money, off now for my 4th coffee on my 21hr workday...
Software engineering as a private sector job is fairly new in the grand scheme of things. Programmers that are 40+ years old probably aren't even all that common, certainly nowhere near as common as programmers younger than that.
Programming probably hit the mainstream in the 1960's, maybe even the 50's. Figure that a lot of people entering that profession started in their 20's, do some simple addition, then repeat your assertion.
I didn't say the jobs didn't exist. My point was the field is FAIRLY new, and as such is still defining itself. I think its hard to argue that software engineering was anywhere near as popular a career in the 70s as it is today.
This is true. When I was in 8th grade, my best friend's dad, a programmer for an aerospace company, had to take a job 100 miles away when that industry crashed. He was quite happy commuting in his 356C Porsche, but the wife saw that was ridiculous and made them move. There was blatant age discrimination then, and I also saw it when my dad had to politic for his Willy Loman job.
Oracle and unix guy.
Who writes this UTTER, utter, BOLLOCKS????
The standard of journalism in anything to do with any technical field has just dropped lower and lower and now its orbiting in the mud at the bottom.
Anyone who gets into Tech Journalism at any age, should just shoot themselves, its not worth waiting until later because they are bound to write something like that article before somebody else puts them out of their incompetence.
Yeah, they are. They are in charge of efficiently allocating their subordinates time. In my experience a manager has to show gross incompetency or become a legal liability before his boss steps in and takes action. If a manager spent money the way he wastes employees time, his boss would be in there all over him. But---particularly in tech---it's just easier to make young people work longer hours to cover up all the bad decisions.
i make over 200K as a software engineer and i'm 46... in my experience, if your are a talented developer and can get it done, you can name your price.
If you were really worth 3x the newbie salary rate, you'd be able to mentor them.
Word does get out. I tell most youngen's to get into a medical line of work. The pay can be astronomical for an average joe. You can be putting in about the same amount of hours. On top of that. They do not look at you like you are over the hill when you are 30. They think of you as 'just getting started'.
The bottom line is here they want cheap gullible workers. Not necessarily good ones. The exact opposite for a doctor.
If you want to work with assholes everyday become a lawyer. If you want to be over the hill when your 35 become a computer programmer. If you want a job that lasts until your 80 become a doctor.
I apologize for coming in late but I've been offline longer than usual. At forty-six I receive at least five phone calls a day and anywhere from six to ten emails every day asking if I am available for work. To be fair I only do contract work and usually only take three to six months contracts, so I must agree that a person over thirty will likely never get a full time position at any company unless they are willing to work for much less than they deserve.
.Net, which at the time was not even close to being a sure thing.
That being said, I can only offer the following advice in remaining in demand as a software engineer even into your forties and beyond. I'm being brutal for a reason so unless you have a clear rebuttal don't reply..
1) And this sucks. If you haven't been programming almost your entire life, twelve, thirteen possibly as late as sixteen, you don't have a chance.
2) You have nothing to do with open source, shareware, kumbaya software, game programming.
3) Don't even try to be a jack of all trades, pick a poison and stick with it.
___a) Case in point. I bit the bullet at Sprint circa 2002 and focused exclusively on
___b) I hated C the first time I saw it in the fall of 1987 but was smart enough to realize that C# was the future if you wanted to develop MS software.
4) This is probably the worse part of staying relevant after 40. While I love my wife and children, I don't have any hobbies, I don't go to movies, I don't read fiction. What I do is read Slashdot, shameless plug, and make sure that I am one of the first people anywhere on this planet that masters any new technology coming down the pike.
5) HTML5, HTML5, HTML5, HTML5 and in the MS world MVC3 / Razor.
6) 51Degrees, 51Degrees. If you are over forty and don't know what that is your getting very close to being too late.
You do realize if I was paid the same amount of money I am making know, I would go back to building mansions in the Hamptons.
Yes I know, it's now.
When I was fresh out of college, I could have moved anywhere, done anything, and done it for less than the going rate and had plenty to live on... as it happened, I took a job with a dodgy looking company based on an ad in the local paper - it worked out, good gig for 12 years. When that gig was up, I had a wife, 2 yr old kid and another on the way, mortgage to pay, etc. etc.
There was an intriguing job offer on a beach in Costa Rica, if it weren't for the kids we might have gone for it...
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2002(end of dot com era). I guess I shouldn't have went to college and just got a job out of college since I was already coding MMORPG style code. But since I graduated after dot com bust, I couldn't get a job. My career never started. Guess it never will. I programmed this in AS3 with a startup
God spoke to me
I'm 43 and I work in the way he describes. I've never had more freedom, more time, or more money. Haven't had a W2 for years, except for one produced by me, and don't want one ever again, because W2's are for cube dwelling, paper shuffling peons. I work mainly out of my home or whatever coffee shop I feel like working in today, or cowork with friends late at night, and I love it. Can you grab a nice Belgium Ale while working, or play with your kids after picking them up from school? I can and do.
Wait, programmers starting today are growing up in the midst of the technology revolution? I thought us old ~40-year-olds grew up in the midst of the technology revolution (specifically, the personal computer revolution). And if you asked my dad, he'd claim he grew up in the midst of the original computer revolution, the mainframe one.
When I first read this headline I panicked. I thought, "I'm 34! I'm at the top of my game, I've never been this good at software development and I'm hitting my shelf life in a year?!?!" That was a terrifying thought!
What I *love* is the art and craft of software design and implementation, and I sure as hell don't want to be a manager. After reading your responses I now know that I won't have to give up what I love just to stay employed. *phew*
Here's what happens: A startup hires a bunch of 20-somethings who are all hacks with big ideas. They scramble for a few years, slapping together the most awful code, all the while thinking their code is awesome. You end up with 1000-line do-it-all functions, god classes, and lots of horrible anti-patterns, leading to code only they know how to maintain. And then they quit to join other startups. Meanwhile, the startup decides to hire some older 35-45 year old pros. "Pros" go in, and spend many months trying to decipher how their code works without breaking anything. Some of them get fired or quit because they a) have lives and b) can't deal with the awful mess that they themselves would never have created.
It's of course not so black and white, usually, but the dynamic is there.
...mind working all night fixing their spaghetti. Granted, social media has very different standards and requirements than business software, and I have respect for large websites that handle a good amount of traffic, but PHP is a language for hacks, not professionals. You will never find a serious, mission critical application written in PHP (or at least I hope not). Maybe Zuckerberg will join the Space Race Playboy set and try to launch an orbit capable rocket via some wicked cool PHP, but then I'm sure he'll have the foresight to send a dog or monkey before climbing in himself.
Time to start a company with ONLY programmers over 50. If it kicks the competition's butt then it will become a model, then a paradigm, then a trend, then a movement, then a standard.
>a bachelor’s degree in CS does not tech you to code but a tech school or own your own does.
>CS is loaded with theory and lacking in skills.
Wow, your noob is showing. You don't even know what skills are.
Back to your workbenches you monkeys!
If that is true then why can't I (age 26) get _any_ software related job at all in a high tech city... being overqualified and young I still get beat out by every one else...
Otherwise you'll get canned around 40 anyway. Your experience is now "too expensive" to management. Especially now with the glut of recent college grads who will work for peanuts just to have a job above McDonalds level.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Perfectly fine with me if the media wants to make us software engineers more scarce.
This was true about 10 years ago, but now we exist in a tech world in which there are way more jobs than people to do them. If all you are doing is low-level gofer programmer and you're 40, yes, you are in a dead end job. But if you have managed to amass technology experience that matches your age, you are extraordinarily valuable.
I will be over here doing great work, advocating the high value practices of the industry, and getting higher and higher salaries from smart employers.
The whole point of the article is that these employers are few and far between, while vast amount of programmers turn 40 and get laid off in short order. Thus next time you get laid off, you will need to compete against massive number of very experienced 40 year olds all trying to get hired by that rare smart employer that did not discard the resume as soon as he/she saw the birth date.
Or you can do what everyone does and become a contractor. If you are able to market yourself very well, this is the best option. If not, you are fucked.
The worst enemy of programmers are programmers. So many of them sell each other out it's not even funny. Everyone in this field is at one point or another willing to one-up their counterparts / co-workers in front of a boss if it means they'll somehow get to the top faster.
If "all these supposed geniuses" stopped being dicks to one another and ban together for freaking change, they'd rule the world.
I have heard the argument that professional athletes get paid Millions of dollars per year because their career spans such a short time and they retire around 40... does this mean software engineers can now use this as a salary negotiation tactic?
This article is hardly unbiased.
The author of this article has made it his life's mission to oppose H1B visas, just Google his name.
He wants programmers to fear for their jobs.
On one hand, I see articles saying that being able to program is more important than ever and that everybody should learn how to program, and then I see articles like this. I can definitely see merit in both viewpoints. On the other hand, (I guess I have three) the entire job market's in the toilet anyway.. (Full disclosure: I'm 40, have been a coder since age 9, do little in my current job)
I'm forty-two and an independent developer and my rate has gone up every year. If, as the article suggests, you allow your skills to go stale, then yes you will find it hard to get work. Duh.
If you keep yourself up to date and manage your career like any other field, you'll do fine. This doesn't mean you have to spend all of your free time training yourself on the next new thing, but you find work that involves newer technology and you learn how it works on the job. If you have a reasonable amount of curiosity you'll do this anyway.
It's worthwhile to talk to recruiters now and then to learn what skills are pulling in the top rates in the market. You may not want to pick them up (no matter how valuable, I simply won't do SharePoint), but you can find out where the market is heading. Networking with recruiters and colleagues is priceless, and it doesn't take much more than an extensive LinkedIn profile.
Personally I find I'm most effective when I switch back and forth between architecture (which emphasizes soft skills and leadership) and hands-on development (to keep my technical skills sharp). It's fun, challenging, and based on my experiences in the market, highly valuable. I try to cover as much ground as possible so that I'm as marketable as I care to be. Also, I don't commit to a particular technology/process/tool as if it's the "holy grail" of development. These things are like fashion and you need to roll on to the next new thing as it comes, even though it may be worse than the technology that it replaces.
Stay humble, stay curious.
It should be noted that if you can't market yourself well, you can work for contracting firms. Believe it or not some of them don't suck and experience helps to identify the good ones. They will take a cut, but you won't be stuck with a McJob.
I've heard academia was ruthless.. but wow.. I suppose one could spray from programmers, then send in campus security to "take out" a few of the admin folks and some theory professors.
You say job security, I say mass murder-- potat'o pot'ato
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' while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior."
Ah, the arrogance of youth, I remember it well...(I still keep mine in a jar on a shelf, just in case, but haven't had much use for it the last couple of decades)
Thanks for making me laugh this morning. I've had a rather shitty couple of days.
Thanks for also reminding me exactly why I got out of this field in the first instance (noticed that I was drifting 'north' of the average age group of my colleagues in my then place of employ, and had no interest in jumping to management), and further thanks for reminding me that I'll have a new batch of these 'young gods' in the form of recent graduates to deal with in a couple of weeks time (the HR dept is of a similar mind to Mr Zuckerberg, and believe *any* problem can be solved if you throw enough 'young' graduates at it, fsck experience..this could explain why only one out of the last thirty or so still works with us, this ageist nonsense isn't just limited to the IT world)
have both a CS and MBA degrees. Unfortunately there aren't many. There aren't many CS grads respect the value of the MBA degree, until they get shafted with MBAs with a music degree background.
Bottom line: There is a reason why student loans for MBAs exists. If you are smart enough to get a CS (or any other engineering)degree, you are definitely smart enough to get a MBA. The other way around is simply not true in most cases.
When the industry start getting filled with people with MBAs with CS background, the culture will start to change.
New Economic Perspectives
Yeah - I'd find the prospect of hiring a 10 yr old a bit of a leap as well.
You'd make a poor robber baron.
-l
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...is that I took machine dependent programming (aka assembly programming aka ECS50) from Dr. Matloff when I was 19, and he didn't bother mentioning any of this until now...that I'm 38 about to turn 39...seriously, I attended UCD from 91-95 and Norm was my instructor for three classes during that time. It sounds goofy, but it's 100% true.
Most of our programmers have been here more than 20 years. I have been there 36 years. We are on a hiring binge. The off-shore people are NOT working out. as our local managers told corporate.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
i think this isn't totally correct. there's always going to be room for supporting legacy applications that require knowledge of older languages and technologies. that field may narrow as time goes on, but a lot of companies feel the risk of completely replacing core systems is just too high for an easy switch over. not to mention that many of these companies have some non-technological oriented management who do not want to be outshined by some upstart kid (been there, done that). i think software engineering (i.e. coding) will only be a dead-end career for those who choose not to expand their skills. i've met some people who enjoy learning new technologies despite their age. the problem isn't really with their technologies but the attitudes of engineers who become too comfortable with their jobs. i do agree with some posts here where people argue for moving towards management. that's something engineers should ultimately strive for, at least if you have no desire to push your skills. the other thing is that i think that plain old coders are not what's valuable these days. anyone can write some crappy if/else statements that are nested a hundred times. but what really makes a difference is the combination of understanding the limitations and potentials of technology and having a general creative side with a touch of business savvy which can make software engineering a not-so-dead-end career. bottom line is that no matter what, you can just expect to stay employed because you can code and have a long resume. you gotta constantly be hungry (and foolish) to stay on top. decadence is what'll destroy any good thing.
So basically, they don't want to hire the more senior engineers who are more expensive and they claim that there are no qualified engineers around so they a ton of H1B Visas...
Something sounds fishy does it not?
Maybe I get the wrong impression, but headhunters call constantly with jobs in my skillset. Programming must be a dying field if this article is true. Thousands of small businesses need programming. They would never consider hiring overseas. I cannot believe there is no place for programming in the future. Maybe corporate programming is dying due to our immigration policies.
For that matter, forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.
I can already see everyone brushing up on C
Cutting and pasting comments with loads of white space seems to be popular most places that measure SLOC.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If you are an engineer in a company that employs corporate technical staff you can continue to advance well beyond the ranks of senior developer without ever moving into management. You will however be directly accountable to levels of management that most developers seldom interact with on a daily basis. If you don't see a path to further your career in company you are with then perhaps its time to look for another employer.
The Bloomberg op-ed article is really just exists to counterbalance all the articles that point to English majors and humanities grads as least likely to get a job after graduation.
The Daily Beast, for instance, positions English majors as #7 in The 13 Most Useless Majors list.
The main point of the Bloomberg op-ed is basic common sense: that software engineers need to stay current with the language du jour (Javascript can be considered one of these "trendy" new languages, considering the low number of job opportunities for FORTRAN programmers), and starting at around 35, engineers should be looking to get into senior-level management positions (which apparently they are letting just about everyone apply for, Humanities majors included).
And pay double for comments... I hear new coders are a bit lax with their code comments
Modern software is built on a freaky stack of hardware/OS/Drivers/Frameworks/Compilers/IDE's-- none of which should be trusted.
It's not like a bridge where you can verify that they are using the correct steel for the job. Or that the bridge is even being built where the blueprints say it will be built.
Then you find out that the nuts and bolts aren't threaded the same way, so you need to specify adapters as machining new bolts is not in the cost estimate.
I'll start giving engineers more respect when semi automatic gun jams are a rarity, rather than an expectation when I spend time at the range.
The old is overqualified in his existing experiences. The new is lower qualified in the new coming languages. Those're the life of CS and CE. They have to run very fast and don't look back.
So it was 1982 in an intro CS class at Cal State Northridge, and the prof was telling the class that the career window in the field for graduates was going to be limited, and in about ten years, system engineers, scientists, and MBAs would be using automatic code generators to turn their high level business logic into completed projects. There is a very, very small kernel of truth to that claim, when you look at tools like MATLAB, Mathematica, and uh, Access.
And, I employ these tools, too. But, in the larger picture, it's been 30 years I've been listening to people tell me that I'd have to be looking for a new career pretty soon. Yet somehow, I've avoided getting pushed out into retail sales or health services. Mark Zuckerberg has a blinkered view of a programmer/software engineer's career arc, and only by reason of his estimated net worth is Bloomberg giving his opinion the time of day.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Journalism 201 stuff. Scare people by exaggerating something. Find a quote from an idiot in th news. File story. Go play for the rest of the day
Ya think all these old programmers have gone over to FOSS and that's why there is so much good FOSS code?
UofT had a textbook for one of their software engineering courses called "Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States" (Heidelberg Science Library). The author, P. Kraft, pointed out that all engineering careers were "in high, out early", and that it was most visible in the programming business. He too recommended you be prepared to get out early. Still available at http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Programming-Heidelberg/dp/0387902481
I didn't get out, nor did my smarter colleague Fred (hi, ratboy!), and we're both still happily employed, still doing the hard stuff. We each do end up doing management, you understand, but the core of what we do is programming.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
When I was looking for work in New York City a year ago, I got that all the time. I either didn't have a decade of experience with a specific software package, or had a decade of experience with too many languages/platforms/technologies. That this shows how quickly I pick up new technologies, or could always find the right tool for the job, is lost on HR people looking to tick a box on a form.
You can be any age and successful in this industry, but it requires a level of ambition and connections that I sadly lack. I'm working basically part-time in web development until my investments hit the magic number on their own. This is perhaps a waste of my talents and training, but is a substantial increase in quality of life.
A very lucky moron, but a moron still.
Take the Instagram deal for a moment. He paid one billion freaking dollars for a product that took 12 guys two years to build,or 24 man years. Or in usual software engineering terms, probably $3-$5 million with fully loaded benefits. And he paid one thousand million for 3-5 million worth of effort, or a 300 to 1 markup.
What he could have done was hire a good team of 10 freaking rock star programmers, pay them $500,000 each cash and $500,000 in Facebook stock and tell them they had a year to clone instagram. For that money he can easily get an fantastic team that would examine the instagram requirements, write a spec and code it.
And he'd be $990M ahead of the game. A year not fast enough or 10 guys not enough to accomplish it? Throw another $10M at it.
Programming is like working on an assembly line. Developers work on the specific thing they have requirements specs for, in a specific language, following a specific SDLC. They also have hours and hours of code review to make sure that everyone's coding looks the same. Newbie software engineers and programmer's I have met do not think out of the box. They are also willing to work crazy hours, like 16 hours a day during the week and on weekends. Its also ok for them to not be incredibly efficient at what they do because they have 16 hours to fix it.
totally not true. I have been there and around the block. I see entry level, and Mid level programmers come in here, they are good at current technology and can code for more hours. But they definitely have a problem coding smarter not harder. I can OO their code and almost reduce a third of their code easily. I also know of 15 years of knowing where bugs usually appear before hand and come up the most. Thats right software engineers decline at 40 and become architects
I will not disclose a 0 day again I will not disclose a 0 day again I will not disclose a 0 day again I will not disc
I do web programming on a team, in a business that is not a "tech business". We also have a back-end "mainframe", etc. ASP.NET and JavaScript on the web, VB.NET and other stuff on the back end. I'm in my forties, and I'm the *youngest* on the team. There is *one* maniacal manager in the whole company who regularly dreams of outsourcing our functions ... and fails like Wile E. Coyote every time :)
Everyone else knows that we do good work, knows that we are cost effective, and doesn't give a #$% about our ages.
The fact that there are companies like this that are successful has always struck me as amazing.
As for declining wages, well hell, aren't you supposed to make your first million before you turn 35? Why don't you get some venture capital like the rest of the kids. And buy some lottery tickets.
Most companies I have worked for, the acquiring company wants to see the architecture and code of the company they are acquiring to make sure they aren't buying crap. I know several companies we looked at acquiring at my old company were passed over because their code / architecture was junk.
Over the hill by 40. I wonder if that will impress women.
If they see the company tanking because of their policies, they will pump and dump it and move on to another. Wash, rinse repeat.
> I'm 43 and I work in the way he describes. I've never had more freedom, more time, or more money.
Absolutely! Start your own business and whore yourself out to the companies that were dumb enough to fire all their really talented guys.
I've never been happier. I wake up every morning at the crack of "whenever the hell I feel like it", make breakfast, take the dog out for a walk, then drop in on some clients.
While the money has never been better, the freedom and peace of mind is infinitely more valuable.
is how those of us still working longterm at the same corporation survive. 46, over 20 years at one company, about 3 years working in another field before switching to IT.
I'm a crackerjack sql programmer, a pretty good shell scripter, know quite a bit about software development and QA methodologies and have used dozens of other oddball languages and tools in my career, but my main purpose and value to the company is that I know how the business runs, both on the user side and the IT side.
I know the IT groups, the business groups, what their function is, how they interact, which ones will be fast, which will always be the guys late on meeting milestones etc. I also know how to translate all the different styles of "requirement conversations" into stuff that can be coded and tested. I've either been lead on or a major contributor to enough mission critical, high profile and complex projects that I have a good reputation with most of these groups.
I've survived a lot of layoffs and outsourcing. Nothing is ever certain though. One thing I do know, is the minute I switch to another company, all that institutional value I bring to the table, both in reputation and company knowledge degrades significantly. I could probably transfer a lot of it to a new environment - hard lessons learned and hundreds of projects under my belt don't go away. But I'd have to rebuild the trust and reputation with those I'd be working with, and adapt to the new company's way of doing things which would cause at least some initial productivity loss.
Frankly, if I'm looking for work at this age, in this environment, I'd want to be doing it from the safety of already having a job. That puts you in the category of "star performer to be poached" rather than "desperate old guy who's past it."
... it takes that long to figure out they don't have many skills. The good ones can always get jobs. I'm 53 and am in demand since I know many different programming languages and databases, understand network and phone systems, have significant operations experience (so I write code that if it has a problem actually tells someone what the problem and fails in a controlled manner instead of aborting). I am willing to tackle any task instead of shrugging and saying "I don't know how to do that". I know several people my age that are in similar situations.
We just got rid of a 40 year old programmer that was one of the worst I'd ever seen. Talked a great story, but when it came time to producing just couldn't do it. I would be amazed if this person will be able to continue in the IT profession, she doesn't have current skills, does everything she can to avoid having to learn them, and isn't honest about what she is capable of.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Zuckerberg an expert huh?, FaceBook is in PHP! Didn't the previous article just mention PHP just dropped in usage by a pretty big percentage? Let's see you write some autonomous avionics code in PHP! Younger generation better my arse, they don't make a drag and drop GUI for developing for real time embedded systems.
I will get flaged for this, but why do you programmers think you're real engineers? You will never work on nuclear reactors, nor will you ever design a bridge. The list goes on. To be a real engineer, you need a strong physics background, and the brains to apply those equations onto society's needs. Software is easy; anyone can program. But very few of you can apply Maxell's equations, or even understand electromagnetics while you're programming. Software engineer = computer programmer. And it's applied mathematics, not applied science.
The only people who care about age over qualifications are those who don't care about quality (like facebook) and just want a bunch of slaves to work long hours for low pay. A lot of these issues would be resolved as well if we held software to a higher standard and you couldn't get away with releasing something completely broken with no repercussions. We don't buy cars and just accept they just don't work. We shouldn't accept it from software either.
Some people probably do deserve to find it harder to get a job. If you don't care to learn new things and just expect to be doing cobol, that's fine but realise there are far fewer cobol jobs going around so of course it's going to be hard to find something.
Zuckerberg is the last person anyone should listen to. He got lucky and he continues to prove he's an idiot by doing things like paying a billion for Instagram.
That looks like a 20 kloc problem.
Einstein, Crick, and a whole swathe of others. Who (other than you) thinks they must have been worthless by 40?
One of the issues is we geeks have is there are so many titles, I rarely keep one for more than a year. I sometimes write a lot of code, sometimes very little. Sometimes I do strategy work, sometimes management, and sometimes I sell. But at the end of the day, I lean on my technology skills a ton. I was able to dive and and gain ownership of our Big Data efforts (my current gig) by noodling around with Hadoop at AWS. The following titles were scribed from my resume ... going back 15 years.
Sr. Architect
Team Lead
ICT Volunteer
Senior Software Engineer
Lead Technologist
Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer
I have a ton of friends with other roles ... Principal, CTO, VP, etc. The key is not to lose your head in the code, learn about business, people and process. I'd argue almost no one has the same job for 5 years, in technology or otherwise. Fortunately technology is a growing field, don't fight it ... grow along with it.
This is Slashdot, after all. We're going to see every outlier around the World. And so far 24 hours after your post, I see only about 4 software developers over the age 50 saying they're still working. So, even by anecdote "Standards", employment for older workers doesn't look
There's a good movie to see: IDIOCRACY...
I could write a thousand lines about this specific issue, but the movie summarizes it all.
The young know everything!
Us old codgers know nothing.... we just invented all the technology so ubiqutous today. The languages and platforms I use now did not even exist when I was 30. I'm not over the hill by any means. I am well-seasoned, but annoyed by the imbecilic pronouncements of the child-elite.
I have seen this happen. Old accounting system bombed out one day. Guy who wrote it in the 80s came back as a contractor for 2x the amount. He had been let go for being incompetent and terrible to work with a few years before, but he pretty much wrote his job security in the code so there was not much choice (until I rewrote the system).
I bet being a software engineer is a much better long-term career than being a Bloomberg reporter, or any kind of reporter for that matter.
I don't reply to ACs
Recently a friend of my was looking for a freelancer to help out with the deployment of large parallel code in a major european bank with a salary about 100 euros /hour. That's about 20k (\approx 30k$) of euros a month for half a year (before taxes, since we don't let people die on streets here in Europe, he would get only 60% of that net). They found a person in his _fifties_ (50) with lot's of experience in the industry and amazing productivity. The top "graduate" of any university would not satisfy even 50% percent requirements for the position, so I don't really see how those magic numbers (35 y.o) really work in practice for _good_ programmers.
My 30+ year career path as a software engineer:
1976 : PL/1 --> TRS-80 Basic --> RPG II --> Basic Four Basic --> COBOL --> PowerHouse 4GL --> Visual Basic --> C++ --> C# --> Java --> Objective C : Today
Many smaller steps omitted around file systems, DB, and Web markup languages. It has been a TON of fun! Now what about HTML5 next...
This is absolute bulls**t. I'm 41, and I get more calls from recruiters now than I ever have in my 15 years in software engineering.
I'm old enough to remember the days when companies had other goals in addition to increasing share holder value. The change came about in the 1980s and the credit is usually given to one man: Jack Welch, then CEO of GE. Check out the Wikipedia article on him:
"In 1981 he [Jack] made a speech in New York City called 'Growing fast in a slow-growth economy'.[6] This is often acknowledged as the 'dawn' of the obsession with shareholder value. "