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Ask Slashdot: Best Training To Rekindle a Long Tech Career?
New submitter SouthSeaDragon writes "I'm a computer professional who has performed most of the functions that could be expected over a 39 year career, including hardware maintenance and repair, sitting on a 800 support line, developing a help desk application from the ground up (terminal-based), writing a software manual, plus developing and teaching software courses. In recent years, I've worked for computer software vendors doing pre-sales support generally for infrastructure products including applications, app servers, integration with Java based messaging and ESB product and most recently a Business Rules product. I was laid off recently due to a restructuring and am now trying to figure out the next phase. With the WIA displaced worker grants now available I am attempting to figure out what training would be good to pursue. I am hearing that 'the Cloud' is the next big thing, but I'm also looking into increasing my development skills with a current language. I wonder what the readers might suggest for new directions."
Since you already know Java, give Android development a try. I know a few people who have rekindled their love of programming by doing some mobile apps.
Unless you're unusually gifted, you're probably learning new things, and thinking, a somewhat more slowly than you were when you were 25.
Only in a law of averages. My observations of old people are they either give up intentionally, the brain freezes up, and they're hopeless, or they keep using the brain and they're more focused than a 20-something. It seems much like muscle mass and health in general as people age.
The percentage of those who give up in a population increases pretty much linear with age. Look out for the ancient wizard, those guys tend to have scary elite skills. Unless they gave up on tech and went into soft skills and are there just because of schmooze power, the schmooze guys tend toward being a laughingstock.
People tend to romanticize their youth a bit. At 25 I was trying to date the intern, had no idea what was going on although I thought I was an expert, still wasted time occasionally drinking, basically was an idiot with a huge surplus of energy and motivation. Which is all SOME jobs need, but most need actual skill.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
. . . .you obviously know IT, can code, and like being productive. You've got both experience and maturity, and likely a good work ethic.
Might I suggest a different tack ? Get into CNC Machining. Consider it the industrial end of the Maker movement, industrial-style. People are needed, it pays well, and if they need you to work overtime. . . .you get paid for it. Plus, at the end of the day, you'll have a tangible result of your work.
And, with the depth and breadth of experience you already have, picking up CAD/CAM shouldn't be a problem, and you'll likely become a floor lead or shop chief in a relatively short time after attaining mastery of your new skills. . . .
Most of people who've put you into this mess are ex-CEOs who've since bailed and retired on their multi-million-dollar golden parachutes.
Cut expenses, Profit. Cut jobs. Profit. Offshore. More profits. Cut quality. More profits. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat...
What? People are no longer buying the mass-produced junk we're importing from China? Sorry about that. Guess it's time for me to bail...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Age discrimination sucks, but people will take a 20-something a lot more seriously than anyone 35+. It is just how the business goes.
Only a 20-something or younger would say such a thing.
I'm 28.. I've run a couple of internet businesses over the last 10 years, and I've met _A LOT_ of 20-something year olds. Most of them are--and I cannot stress this enough--fucking idiots.
Their SINGLE advantage is that they are cheap. As long as you can prevent them from fucking up too badly, you'll be able to save some money.
Preach it.
I recently turned 40, and I work with a number of people in their twenties. I consistently finish project faster than they do ... however, this is often obscured by the fact that I give longer (and more accurate) estimates for projects. I've learned a new programming language every year for the past 10 years or so (this year was Haskell; my brain is still blown) and my employer highly values my skills and experience. I have another friend who works as a "project troubleshooter". He is brought in, as a contractor, to save projects that aren't getting completed or whose performance is so bad that they're unusable. He primarily does coding, not management, and makes about $500,000 a year as a consultant in his late 50's.
The other thing I'd observe is that most of the newer graduates never REALLY learned the fundamentals. They think of memory in "gigabytes", not "megabytes", and they tend to have slept through basic ideas like evaluating algorithms. (I recently had to explain to a computer science major from an Ivy League school with a rep for computer science the significance of "big O" and why an algorithm with O(n!) was a bad idea. He was a smart kid, but apparently that concept was just never hammered home.) Likewise for memory management -- all most recent graduates know about memory management is that the garbage collector does it. Likewise, for them machine language is hopefully obscure, and if they were ever confronted with a selector panel their brains would freeze up.
Don't count us old farts out yet. There are advantages to having first learned programming on a computer whose memory was only 5Kb, with a 1 Megahertz processor. (A Vic 20.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
A manager I knew once asked me if I knew someone who I could recommend for an open position. I asked what his dream candidate would be like, and he said ten years supervisor experience, early thirties, good school, like Ivy League.
I had to pull Gershwin's Law[*] on him, and told him that basically, he wanted a daddy's boy who's overpaid and never had to prove himself. To have ten years supervisor experience in your early thirties, you have to have been hired directly after school, which is unlikely unless daddy pulled strings. An Ivy League degree in this case would just increase the risk of this being the case.
So we sat down with a couple of pints and I found out what he really wanted - which turned out to be someone who had experience and could be depended on. I recommended hiring someone 40+ who was a victim of a structural lay-off.
IIRC he hired a 20-something who jumped ship after less than a year, just as he was starting to become useful. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
[*]: "It ain't necessarily so."