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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.
I wouldn't recommend learning stuff with the hope of finding a job that uses it. I feel like you should spend some time, look around at various tech projects and languages and applications, etc etc. Find a job you want like "I'd like to work for Amazon S3, it seems really interesting." or something and then figure out what you need to do to get it, training or otherwise. I feel like that would be more fulfilling and have a better chance of success.
If you have a 39 year old career, that means you are likely just a few years from retirement.
A company that hires you will likely hire you for skills you have experience with - not any new skills you have no experience with. Those jobs will, unfortunately, go to young grads.
My recommendation is to take one of the skills you have plenty of experience with and get a formal training in it. Even if it bores you, it will likely boost your employment probabilities more than anything new and interesting like the cloud. Because it is new, companies will be looking for young people who (a) are cheap, and (b) hopefully will stay after gaining experience, so the company can take advantage of that experience down the road.
Sorry if this wasn't what you wanted to hear - I wish things were different, but we old timers aren't all that attractive for things we don't have experience with.
From what I've been reading in the business press over the last couple of years, when folks lose their jobs in their 50s or later, they're screwed for the rest of their life. More than likely, he'll never work again as a professional or in any white collar job.
That is also a reason why disability claims with Social Security have been sky rocketing these last couple of years - older people unable to work so they go for early retirement or disability if they are too young.
It's a crying shame, too.
Cloud + "Big Data" are happening things these days. I am a 64yo professional and started a new career at the first of the year in telecom. Cloud + Hadoop + Big Data are serious issues these days. I'm gaining my chops in that area (main emphasis is performance engineering), and there is a LOT of interest in anyone with "Big Data" (Hadoop + MapReduce) type of experience.
If you have been steadily going up the pay scale during your career, you might have to take a significant pay cut - maybe 40% or more, to get another job. As I'm sure you've heard often enough, IT is not kind to those over 50. And nowadays 45 is the new 50. If you have specific niche skills, those are what you should try to market. There is still a considerable amount of legacy hardware and software out there, and it would be better to look there, and hopefully replace someone who is retiring, than live a pipe dream of "reinventing" yourself as a Java/Android/HTML5/Node.js/Hadoop expert.
I do not believe training will help much at this point in your career. Your age will work against you much more than any shiny new certification will work for you. All the twenty somethings are all over the hot new fads. But they will probably not be applying for jobs that involve AS/400 control language, or VAX/VMS.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
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
Are you honestly looking for suggestions on training to take that will be good for the next 5 years?
First off, in this job market, don't expect to sail into an upper-level position, so you are likely looking at a grunt-level job.
My advice would be to learn either network security OR virtualization - your diverse skill set will augment either of those two areas, and in security you may have an advantage not being a twenty-something with dubious credentials (AKA self-taught). I think you are honestly at the end of your career, or at least, you can see it from where you are - your greatest strengths are your previous experiences, look for a way to build on them in a growing segment of the industry.
Ken
A lot of companies are complaining that they just can't find good tech folks ...
... for $10/hr no benefits, or mandatory 80 hour per week overtime, or intern unpaid jobs, or "pay you in shares" startups, or ridiculously over specified.
Pay in peanuts, you get monkeys.
I see no evidence of an actual shortage.
I know its discouraging, but just trying to keep it real. Its not 1999 all over again. Or even 2004.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Or he could, you know, find work in a position befitting his experience? Catering to home users is generally bottom of the barrel in terms of pay and probably getting the same PITA phone calls about their network not working because little Timmy downloaded too much pronz.
There are some companies around that actually value an older guy who's a little humble and knows the ropes. Hotshot 25 y/os may have the cool factor and are in touch with what's hot, but at the same time make a lot of mistakes their older peers no longer make nor have the same perspective.
IMO, if the guy has any legacy knowledge of systems still in use but no longer sexy, he should leverage that.
I was just kicking out one idea, because we don't know a ton about his competence or other qualifications.
I figured that as a community, we were collectively trying to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall.
At least you will never have to worry about getting old. At some point you will mouth off to the wrong guy and get shot.
. . . .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. . . .
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.
That's pretty much the ultimate ""your own fault" approach. There is a fairly widespread subset of th epopulation that thinks that any ailment is the sick person's fault.
Perhaps the giving up happens when the person's brain isn't working as well as it used to. Sometimes stuff like age happens, and despite our best efforts, no one get out of here alive.
Though it is appealing to think that as long as I do Sudoku, I'll never die or become senile........naahhh, I hate frickin' Sudoku!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I too no longer have the energy for 12 hours days. However, I generally finish projects a lot faster than younger people on my team. Almost like experience counts for something...
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.
First answer that question. What do *you* really want to do? The proceed from there. Don't just chase after the latest fad, they come and go and have the shelf life of fresh fruit. And fads can often end up as dead ends. Find out what you would be happiest doing. Even if it means a career change. Get career counseling if you have to but explore that question first.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
Damn straight.
I'm forever grateful for the "Old fart" (as you so endearingly put it) that hammered exactly those topics, plus introduced the wonders of Djikstra et al into my coding.
And like he used to say. Youth and enthusiasm are always trumped by Age and Treachery!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
That's pretty much the ultimate ""your own fault" approach. There is a fairly widespread subset of th epopulation that thinks that any ailment is the sick person's fault.
I don't know if there's a formal term for it, but I've heard it referred to as the "Just World Fallacy". People assume the world is fair, and thus if something bad happens to someone, it's his fault - either he took actions that led to his misfortune, or he failed to take actions to prevent it.
Basically, people who invoke it need to feel secure about the world. They want to believe such stuff won't happen to them.
Anyway, as for the GP's theories, I've seen research that shows that things like taking care of your health, aerobics, etc are far more likely to help older folks' brains solve problems than keeping them active with technical stuff (mathematics, puzzles, etc).
Beetle B.
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."
Heh, One experience I had illustrates the fresh developer vs seasoned. I was hired in to help a couple of younger guys that wrote an application so I could help speed it up.
One of the better guys was struggling to find out why his queries for data wasn't pulling back what he thought he should be getting. He'd been staring at his stuff for the better part of an hour before he asked me.It took him 2 minutes to explain his problem to me, and it took me two minutes and a whiteboard to scope out why he was thinking wrong.
He was pretty well taken aback and asked me "How the fuck did you figure it out that fast?"
I replied "Cause I had the same issue a long time ago and asked someone who knew what they were doing."
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!