Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain?
Talcyon writes "I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support. I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area. I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it? Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software? I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others. Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?"
I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others.
Right, this sounds somewhat similar to this question and you can take or leave my old advice. Some good replies to my post as well.
I don't get it. This is such a fatalistic and defeated attitude! Will I, too, give up the ghost at age 40? I don't think you're ever too old to learn something knew but I'm 30 years old and my idea of a fun weekend is reviewing a book on a new fledgling language or framework. And there's plenty of room for criticism for me concentrating on diversity rather than depth.
I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support.
I'm sorry. Honestly, I really am sorry. I don't like that framework, I don't like that language. Also when I was growing up it was largely a "pay to play" realm and largely still is (although I know I can get my hands on an express IDE).
I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area.
Again, a fatalistic attitude. It's possible you never found a good role of management for you. It requires more time but there's always a "lead by example" model for leadership. It's not as easy as delegating but you can earn a lot more respect. It does suck up a lot more of your time though. Also, good companies offer at least two ways to advance in development. One is management and the other is technical lead. If your company has technical leadership roles you could look into them.
Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software?
Look, if you hate your job, get out of it. I don't care if you're 40 and have a mortgage to pay, start looking for something else that makes you happier than where you are now. Life is too short. You can't waste years hating your work. Support role will probably pay the bills but it's gonna suck, I suggest you give it a go and pick up some new languages in your free time and work on projects that you can host on github, Heroku or some VPS even if they are just functional and have no users. You can at least put those on your resume and say "I made this by myself and I can make stuff like this for you."
Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?
It would be a lot easier if you were asking me how you get from A to B but what I'm hearing is "I'm at A and it sucks so do I retrain or what do I do here?" Tell me what you want to do, tell me what satisfies you at the end of the day and I'll tell you how to get there. That "or am I too old" part at the end of your question isn't even an option. It's quite inane, actually. How daft would I have to be to say "Naw, dude, you're forty years old, you're long in the tooth, your bones are half dust, you've got one foot in the grave, you're on borrowed time, give it up already and just roll over. Me, on the other hand, I'm never gonna be in your shoes, no sir. Gonna be twenty one FOREVER and Java's always going to be the de facto standard or I'll just YOLO out." I mean, seriously, who's going to answer that way?
My work here is dung.
... oh, wait, I'm 46 years old.
Other than that, the entire original summary could be me ... spooky.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
I never ask myself this question. When faced with a new technology I dive in, start tearing in with gusto, and master it.
If you need to ask yourself this question, maybe you are just tired of being a developer in general.
No.
/thread.
... it's not because of your chronological age.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you had any motivation within the field, you would have been keeping track of interesting areas and trying stuff out on your own time. As you didn't bother (life/family getting in the way doesn't cut it with employers), you are a classic employee that gets comfortable in a role and then expects the money to come in with "training" thrown in. Unfortunately for you, that doesn't last in IT, once you're out of a job, you're pretty much caught out for what you really are.
I'm 35 and had been doing mostly C++ work for my career. I recently went back out to look for a new job, and finding mostly Java stuff, I got the Android SDK and wrote a few Android apps to hone those Java skills. Now I've got a new job doing Java stuff and learning a skillset that I think will be in demand for a while yet.
Personally, I've never understood the idea of needing to be "trained" to program or build software or systems. Why not just figure out how to do it? If you can't figure out how to solve problems and be valuable in something besides VB.NET, then maybe age isn't really the issue.
40 years old is so young if you take care of yourself! I'm pushing 40 and I know as well as when I was 20 that tech is what I love to do and that's what I am going to do. I have noticed changes in getting older, like getting in the zone takes a little longer, but using age as an excuse to not get the job done has never entered my mind. Figure out what you want to do, and fricking do it!
Which tells me it's not your age ... it's your ability. You have none. Oh, and I'm a 45 year old .NET 2.0 developer who has just learned .NET 4.0 for a new job, with a 20% raise.
You just need to update your skills man. The language you work in is irrelevant. If you are a good dev you can program in any language. I just took on a >$100K contract for a language I'd never worked on. I've only got two things left to do, start and finish. No problem!
I'll answer that way.. his defeatist attitude deserves the answer.
Rather than sitting around slashdot asking questions, I'd of been off locking myself in a room to learn something with a decent market share and something I enjoyed coding in. I'm nearly 40 and I tend to pick up new languages and keep working at it.
Like any decent career it takes hard work and a lot of your time to keep progressing. .NET is still a skillset with worth.. that is if you're any good at it.
Your in technology, like it or not this is a field that requires more continuing education as a matter of course (if not law) than a lawyer or a doctor. You should never ever be retraining or training. Instead you should constantly be working on your next thing skill and never ever become complacent.
You can't afford to work in this field in a job where you know everything. You have to find a job where you have 80% of the qualifications so that you can learn the other 20% and expand your skill sets. If you don't you become the expert who is 100% qualified at something that was relevant five years ago. The expert who is 100% qualified is also known as tomorrows dinosaur.
Never, ever rest, never ever allow yourself to be in a position where you cannot be challenged. Whatever job you find, it has to be one where you are picking up new skills and learning new things - whatever those new things are.
I have also learned it can help to talk to your managers and explain that you want to start learning more about the business side or whatever else you have an interest in. It is called initiative and it will set you apart from all the other people that show and simply do their job.
I was in your same position in my forties. An old mentor gave me this advice...What is the general area in computer technology that you like to do and then build on that. Building, in my case was finding a job in data architecture (starting position) and start doing and learning. This way you are interested enough to slog through the learning curve and still getting a pay check. Hope this helps,
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
Don't complain. You got an extra 10 years. You should have "gone on" a decade ago. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/ for details.
Exactly, I invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines. So they answer is indeed "no". The real question then becomes why "no"?
40? Seriously? You've got another 24 years until retirement so you better get your head in the game.
Tried management? Okay what went wrong? Did you just hop in without any personal and professional development? Take classes, do things like toastmasters, you need to refine your skills.
On the other hand maybe you want to stay on the technical side. First realize you are in control. You let yourself get out of date YOU need to fix it. It's not like the concepts are all that foreign. Put your nose to the grind stone. Take classes, join open source projects, Most importantly you're going to need to change jobs. You are likely typecast as the old guy with out of date skills. Figure out what strikes your fancy be it more .Net or Web Stuff, JavaScript whatever.
I would only leave if you truly aren't enjoying computer work anymore.
I find the problem is not so much age but family. I've got 2 kids and I can't spend as much time engrossed in tech as I used to. This is depressing, but I rely on my coworkers to understand as I grow as a person into, hopefully, something more than the straight tech I was before as I learn patience and other traits from having to deal with my life as a father and husband.
I am 51, and currently enjoying the best phase of my career to date. Front end development -- lots of work for JavaScript/jQuery developers at present, here in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
The best part is, I seem to be getting more respect as a Senior Man in my field ... mind you, that's not my job title, I'm just another contract developer ... but I hold my head high, let my confidence shine, and enjoy the generous measure of respect that people seem to give me.
Twenty years ago, my assumption was that I would be obsolete within twenty years, and that I should expect to degrade (as gracefully as possible) from developer to technical writer. That hasn't happened: I'm still a developer, and more in demand than ever.
This is only possible, I suppose, because I love to learn; in effect, I am constantly in training. If you have a similar mindset, I would advise you to Go For It.
-kgj
(I'm going to disregard every single anecdotal evidence that is going to pop)
I started my career as an ASM developer, coding firmwares. Later I did projects in C and C++. I've seen serious projects in several languages, ranging from COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, FORTH, REXX, DELPHI, JAVA, C# and a few others.
If you want to get ahead in your career, stop playing with TOY languages. VB.NET is ok if you are doing a small 1-2 person project to manage your uncle's gas station, or something equivalent. If you want to work big corp, you need something that works for big projects. And that means more than just switching languages. You need to rethink your whole methodology. Software modeling, UML, the whole shebang.
If you want to be a 1 man shop, then you need to focus on reusability, portability and things like that. That means JAVA.
Script languages like RUBY and Python might also be a good idea if you want to go into web development.
So, what should you do ? I ask a different question: what can you afford to do ? Can you afford the time and costs of retraining ? What will you do in the mean time ? This switch is going to take you a couple years, most likely.
You need to understand your options a little better before deciding what you should do. Who knows, maybe a complete career change is in order. I'm a bit younger than you, and I'm working on switching out of IT. It is a 5-8 years plan. Doesn't happen overnight either.
morcego
40 is plenty young enough to re-train...or in this case I would just say "catch up". If you are already familiar with the .net namespace (even older versions), it's not that hard to switch to C#. I had years of experience with VB6 and VB.NET but no C experience of any kind and made the switch to C# on the job and have never looked back. While I still can (and have to to support old code) switch back to VB, I actually prefer C# now and will code in it if given the choice. I spent a few years in Delphi, which was awesome, but after Borland ran it into the ground, there just wasn't any shops around coding in Delphi to work for so rarely fire up a Delphi IDE anymore.
.NET framework. And there is a TON of employers that prefer or mandate it.
In then end, the advice is simple: just embrace C#. It's really easy to learn when you already understand the
It might be too late for you, but age has nothing to do with it. This is technology... you can't ever stop learning new things, unless you really enjoy maintaining legacy systems. If you want to work on new-project development then yes, your skills are woefully out of date, and you have nobody but yourself (and certainly not your age) to blame for it.
Get yourself onto a stable project with a future, any project. Heck, even a support job as long as it keeps you employed. Once you are there, throw yourself into learning something current, preferably something that can be integrated into your now-new job. Even support teams have a continuous need for little utility programs to make life easier. (Although support may not be a good fit if you aren't a people person...)
When I was in my 30's everyone told me that I wouldn't be getting jobs in my 40's.. I spoke to a lot of people at the time who were older and leaving the business because they could not get hired. At the time I thought such people just weren't keeping up with the times or were just B level people. Wrong. As I turned 45 and older I found less and less people willing to hire me.
:(
The problem is not in your ability to learn new tech most likely - the problem will be that people will not want to hire you. Why is this? Several reasons:
1. You cost more. Even if you are willing to work the same wages you will be perceived as costing more.
2. Your medical insurance costs to the company will be higher. Even if you don't actually use that insurance the company will be charged higher rates if they have an older workforce.
3. You will be perceived as willing to work less. Maybe you have a family or heaven forbid - a life! Unlike a 22 year old who likely has neither of these things you will probably be less likely to work 60 - 70 hour weeks on a salary.
4. Your boss will likely be younger than you and knows less. Hence you will be perceived as a threat.
So welcome to the wonderful world of I.T.! Now go away
Your best options for future career are to get out of development and into management or to start your own business.
Me? Eventually I opted to get out of the field and am retraining as an RN.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
As Anonymous Coward said, you just about said everything that needs to be said.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
There are free online learning courses at coursera.org and codeacademy.com and MIT Open Courseware for learning. If you're not ready to write an application for Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift, take a few free courses to learn the concepts.
Something I finally started to learn in my early 30s is that for most people most of the time, if you get really good at something difficult, it will become entertaining for you. Learning how to write my first programs sucked. Even working on code in a lot of my 20s sucked. But in my late 20s and now 30s I had kids and if I didn't get pretty damn good at my job, I couldn't command the salary I needed to pay the bills. I started busting my ass to go from low-mediocre to something better, and suddenly I was having a lot of fun. I can't judge my skills now, I'd like to think I'm competent but I may be barely past low-mediocre. Regardless, I can do a lot more than I could before at a lot faster pace, and I get to tackle interesting problems instead of relatively routine things. Those changes make the job fun in a way I never imagined even as a teenager dreaming of writing video games.
Now get out the way old man!
Oh wait, I'm older than you... All kidding aside, as long as you are still breathing and conscious, its never too late to learn something new.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First of all, I'm a mite suspicious that this article is a plant. If being behind on .net was a career killer, we'd have folks jumping off their squat, ugly tilt-ups right and left. It'd be like 1929, with geeks.
At 40 the sky's the limit. At 40 I moved to a different state, got a job in a different field (shifting from tech to marketing) got married and had a kid. At 45 I changed careers again, (tech management) and again at 53 (business intelligence). Age is a number. It's will, focus, and energy that's important. You can always retrain, regroup, and succeed, if you have the will. Reading your article, I suspect you're having fun with us, but if you actually feel that way, and don't just need minor assurance, you've already lost.
Short answer: You can hone your skills or retrain at any age. If you think you can't, that'll be true also. It's up to you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person.."
Not people persons are perfect for the job, take a few breath courses, so that you can yell at people without exerting yourself and you'll be OK.
Yes. No one over forty can learn anything. You are "old people" now, to be treated with contempt and condescension.
Actually, the fact that you have allowed your skills to become rusty so quickly indicates that you are not really interested in programming.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
2. Start your own company, or
3. Learn MVC. Unit testing. Factory Methods. DRY.
But MVC is mainly what you mean by "woefully out of date." That's the biggest wrinkle in the Microsoft world for you to get your head around. Get your head around it, it's not that alien.
http://www.asp.net/mvc
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era."
.NET 2.0 skills. Taken literally however, .NET 2.0 skills are not confirmed by this statement.
.NET. Has nothing to do with age.
Implied are
Why this unclear statement? I will conveniently jump to conclusions and say: this person is a mediocre developer having only done some VB.NET stuff and can't make the jump to
My karma ran over your dogma
Gimme a break! I *began* my software engineering career at 36 after leaving an electrical engineering career, and I am still going full steam ahead at 62 (including earning a MSc in Computer Science at 51). I will consider myself too old for something when I reach 124. Until then, I see no reason to stop doing what I love. Ask yourself why you cannot do the same.
I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person
...
Have you ever met a manager who is a 'people person?'
Assuming an affirmative - are they hiring?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm 42. I've been a Unix/Linux sysadmin since I was in college -- about twenty years now. Or I was. You see, last year, I got a job with a new company, and after I'd been there about four months, my boss came to me and said, "Hey, you know how we've been looking for a new programmer? Well, we noticed you'd done some programming in the past (which I had, in college for my CS degree, as a hobby, and writing Perl and Bash as a sysadmin), and we're having a much easier time finding sysadmins than programmers, so we're wondering if you'd consider trying being a programmer."
I said yes -- with the agreement that if I wound up really hating it, I could go back to my old job. In the six months since then, I've gotten up to speed with modern Java (last time I'd touched it was way back when Sun was originally introducing it) and the Spring framework. The programmer who did most of our DBA stuff left in the course of that, and since I was the guy who was least important on the programming side of things, I also got tasked with taking over that -- so I'm learning MySQL administration now.
It's working out fine. I've found that I can't do like I used to in college, and read a book on a new subject and retain a ton of it without any real effort... but I don't need to. I've got enough general tech background knowledge that I can quickly find out what I need to know, when I need to know it. The stuff I do on a regular basis starts to stick pretty quickly -- and for the minutiae, it's really enough that I can remember "Oh, I read something about that." These days, with Google, if I remember that much, I've generally got the answer within ten minutes. Often less.
Some of the stuff I'm learning, I'm having fun with it. Some of it I'm not, but hey, it's a job -- if I enjoyed it all, they'd make me pay them to come here. And my old knowledge is still coming in handy -- when the systems crew can't figure something out, they come to me to ask about it. My old non-Java programming experience still applies in a lot of ways, and my knowledge of networks and Linux is often useful as well.
Honestly, unless something goes physically wrong with my brain, I can't see me ever stopping learning -- hell, my dad's in his 70s, and he's still learning new things keeping up his hobby of restoring and working on cars. It might get slower, but really, the big thing is just to keep going. If you give up and stop, you definitely won't learn whatever new thing you're trying to learn.
Sorry friend, I can understand where you are. The technical answer is, "yes, of course you can train yourself in up-to-date technologies". But if you have to ask Slashdot if it's possible, you never will. You need to have the fire in your belly, and continually invest in your own career if you're going to be in this business past 40. Trust me - I'm 46. If you're not ready to reinvent your skills every 5 years, get out of tech.
If you like what you do (i.e. develop in .Net), getting up to speed isn't that hard. The differences between .Net 2.0 and 4.0 aren't all that great. If you're worried that doing it on your own won't be enough, take a class. There are tons.
But your tone suggests that really the problem is you don't want to make the effort. I understand that. I'm 43, and often when confronted with the need to learn some new technology, I feel loathing rather than excitement. If that's your problem, then maybe it is time to switch careers. Congratulations on deciding you're not a good manager. Now find something else.
I'm older than you and I think you need to change your approach entirely. I am in a constant state of retraining. It's a way of life. In my opinion if you don't learn you might as well be dead. It doesn't matter if you are in technology or not, you will still have to retrain. I think the question you need to ask yourself is "do I enjoy technology?" Do I enjoy writing code and figuring out problems? If so then learning something new won't be a big deal, it will happen by default. If not, well learn something else. I've been through 4 distinct and vastly different careers (3 successful, 1 a dismal failure..but hey I know I don't want to do that again) and I expect to go through at least 4 more. Otherwise it would be boring. Asking if you are two old for something is like asking if it's time to die. Age has nothing to do with it, absolutely zero. If you feel your brain is slowing down then start getting some exercise. I just never could get how some people could work their life just so they could retire.
Of course you can retrain. Buy some books and get to it. In the past few years I've learned several languages, tons of libraries, and many new concepts, all from reading and doing, no courses or formal training necessary. I can keep up with developers in their 20s and 30s. Frankly, I'm amazed that you're so negative about this at the still-wet-behind-the-ears age of 40.
No sig? Sigh...
Hey, I'm older than you are so don't let age be a barrier to your success. The first thing you need to ask yourself is what do you enjoy doing? Not what pays me the most money, not what hot skill can I chase, not am I washed up - what do you like doing. If you like coding, and it sounds like you do, then get some books or look at some online offerings. The good news is that .NET is object based so at least you're not coming from a COBOL background. That would be a lot tougher hill to climb. You might want to start out with Java. It has it's flaws but it's widely used so there is definitely work out there.
Another option for someone your (our) age is consulting. You've been around a while and probably learned some lessons along the way. That sort of experience is valuable in the business world. But I'm going to tell you straight - to be successful in consulting you've got to have some people skills. You're also going to need to be good at requirements gathering and have excellent verbal and written communication skills. It's not for everyone but it can be a very rewarding career.
How about a technical architect? You know, the guy that designs the solutions and hands them off to someone else to code. For that type of thing you don't necessarily need an intimate command of the language (although it's helpful). What's more important is understanding conceptually what the business problem is and how to use technology to get to the solution.
Maybe SAAS? Software as a service is the big thing now. Products like Salesforce and Workday, to name a few, are getting a lot of traction. Sure, you're going to have to learn some new skills but since it's so new everyone else has to learn it too. So you're on equal footing.
In short, find something you love to do. Once you've done that get some books or take a course or two and dive right in. Don't be intimidated by age or anything else. If I can do it so can you. Good luck.
What do you want/willing to do? It doesn't sound as if you really cared to be a software developer in the first place. You can't stand still with respect to your knowledge/skills and everyone knows (or at least should know) that. Presumably you went to school and/or read books, etc. to get the skills you presently have. If you want to get back into software development you're going to need to bury your nose in the books once more and then unlike before make a practice of keeping it there. Are you up for that?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
As a 52 year old developer - no!
I'm currently a Java developer. Played with it on-and-off since about 2000 (when I was 40). However didn't become a fully fledged Java developer until 2009. Before that I was a VB6 developer (which I started learning when I was 41!). Next challenge, GWT.
What is more, in any other profession (e.g. medicine, law) where there can be rapid changes in knowledge and skill required, you don't get the issue of 40 (or 50 or 60) being too old.
You're never too old! I intend to keep on with this stuff even when I retire. It's fun!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Seems like you could get into that.
Why do you have to be 'retrained'? Can't you just pick a technology up? I worked with .NET 2.0 years ago and recently did another project with the. C#/.NET 4/ C++ interop. Took me a week to get up to speed. Before that I wrote and android app and now I'm writing an objective C app for the iPhone.
Sorry, but I think the problem is your attitude. You should have been learning all the time, non stop. The fact that you're not tells me you need to find a different career.
d
I'm 58. During my career, I have worked with PDP-11 assembly language, 68000 assembly, FORTRAN and PL/I on VAX/VMS, x86 assembly and C on MS-DOS, "C with Objects" and later C++ on Classic Mac, C++ and Java on Windows, server-side Java for a short time, Curl, client-side Java, Objective-C/C++ on MacOS and iOS, and I'm currently doing cross-platform Qt development while I spin up a new phase of my career doing independent and/or contract iOS development.
The thing that saved my career was the personal computer, which allowed me to develop new skills at home on my own time. A lot of my Java training was self-driven, and I am completely self-taught on Objective-C and Cocoa.
At 40, I wouldn't hesitate to go back to school for formal training if I could find an appropriate program, but until then, pick something that looks like fun (in my case, it's iOS development), pick a project that's fun enough to motivate you (even if it'll never get marketed, or even "finished"), and dig in.
If you don't find software development fun or motivating, find something else that is. On this anniversary of Steve Job's death, remember that life is too short to do something that doesn't motivate you.
Good luck!
If you enter the work force in your early 20's, at 40 you're less than halfway to 65, which is a "normal" retirement age... in other words, at 40 you're still in the first half of your career. No matter what you decide, it's not because you're "too old" that you'll succeed or fail. But in technology it really pays to like what you do and be willing to try lots of technologies, languages, systems, etc. Do side projects you like and if you find one you REALLY like see if you can make it your job. Or just find the highest buck-for-the-bang, slog through your workday and spend the money on insanely fun weekends and vacations. There are a lot of paths here, and I don't think Slashdot can tell you how to live your life.
(Disclosure: I'm 39)
E pluribus unum
The day you say to yourself, "I'm too old to change ..." is the day you start to die. I can't remember how many times I've made major changes in my life. I'm always learning new stuff and I will as long as I'm alive. It is never too late to retrain, learn new stuff or even begin a whole new career.
If you are in technology, you are ALWAYS RETRAINING. My skill set turns over every few years. I'm 46 and learning care of an apache/mysql/php setup. One year ago, I started serious wrestling with Windows 7. Two years ago, I picked up Powershell and dived into following smartphones. Three years ago, I picked up some SQL, lots of radiology technology, and VBA scripting. I keep up on Linux and Mac. I read about 30 tech related RSS feed per day. Keeping up with your field is part of being a professional.
Bang away for ninety minutes a day upgrading your skillset. Make this a habit first thing in the morning. An extremely useful book is "Willpower" which discusses the daily depletion of will, and how to compensate for that, and enhance it -- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/willpower-roy-f-baumeister/1100482735 Just as folks tend to sleep in ninety minute cycles, so too is studying best done in uninterrupted ninety minute chunks. Microsoft toolsets mutate often, but they share a common design philosophy, so if you know VB and an older edition of .NET you will be pleasantly surprised at how quickly you can "upgrade" to C# and the latest .NET.
Forge the habit of an early morning hideout study period of ninety minutes with your laptop and a computer book, and work your way through tutorials. And whatever worked for you to get you to your current level of knowledge is probably still a valid approach. Remember too that you are over the biggest hurdle, which is understanding how the edit-build-run-repeat cycle works in your IDE (likely Visual Studio).
I'd elaborate on the parent post, but it's hard to, since he covered a mountain of ground.
I'm approaching my mid-40s. I'm still learning new things, almost on a weekly basis as new things pop up. In my humble opinion, OP is approaching the question wrong - it's not "should I re-train", it rather should be: "...why did I let my otherwise continuous training slip so horribly?"
I know the answer, sort of. It's hard to get deep into a new language when the kids bug you with requests or questions that never end, and the wife wants to know when you are going to put that damned laptop down and cuddle with her in front of some stupid chick flick that you'll instantly forget once it's over. On the other hand, in this biz, you have to keep the training continuous. Slow down, and you fall behind... unless you specialize in COBOL or FORTRAN, falling behind too much is pretty detrimental to one's career.
As for the management thing, maybe it was just a shit position? I've done the management thing, and still do when the job calls for it... I find that the 'people person' skills are a minor (albeit powerful) part of it - the majority is paper-shoveling and leadership, coupled with a knack for keeping a billion disparate tasks prioritized as they arise and (hopefully) in deadline. I've seen asshats with a complete lack of people skills succeed wildly in management, simply because they can keep ten thousand different priorities and tasks all wired tight and done on time. May want to give that another go, but do it in a way that you report to other people - hopefully under people who are good mentors this time around.
Overall, yeah... it sounds like a life change/decision. Personally, follow what you love to do, and to hell with the rest. Dying a happy old retired garbageman or janitor is far preferable to dying as a miserable middle-aged CEO, yanno? It's your life - do what *you* want to do with it. Even if you (eventually) retire as a code-monkey? If you enjoy it, then for heaven sakes - do it!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If you think you're too old to learn something new, then it's not your age... it's your mindset. In which case, a career change would be inevitable anyways. If you're truly committed to what you do in a particular field, you grab the problem by the lapels and rape it into a state of perpetual subservience. With your experience, I hope that only one of your parents was a deep roller.
With little to go on, I would question whether you were/are good in software anyway.
There are a lot of cheap, young, up-to-date, mediocre, programmers. If you've hit 40 and can't identify an area where your experience puts you ahead of these people, and your only chance is to compete with them, I'd seriously be looking for a change where what experience you do have will help you.
One thing that I've learned in my 27 years is that there are a good number of older people who pick up things even young men and women can't because of the fact that they've seen so many different things in their lifetime. The question isn't are you too young or too old to better yourself, the question is are you willing to better yourself. People said there was no hope for me. They said I'd always be a drunken fool, but I don't get drunk now because I feel as though I've been delivered from it. It's true that I have other problems that were more than likely the root of that, but if you are willing to learn and move forward,you will. They tell alzheimers patients that it's important to do mathematics, read, and even try to learn new skills. Much like it's important for me to move forward, occupying myself with less things that have to do with the problem and more things that have to do with the solution. It's rare that someone learn a new skill or even behavior in one day. The willingness to do so is far more important.
I don't get it. This is such a fatalistic and defeated attitude!
The original poster wants a reality check. He wants to know a realistic path and idea of what he can do.
If you keep at it not wanting to be a "quitter" and never getting any bites or feedback, one eventually has to wake up and smell the coffee. And in IT, the attitude is if you're out of work then there's something wrong with you so get the hell out! So we're SUPPOSED to "quit" because we're no good. So, _I_ can't blame him at all for his "quitter" attitude.
The parent's post above is a nice vague motivational "get your ass in gear" type of thing, but offers no concrete advice and is completely worthless.
I myself was in the same situation. No one was able to give me concrete advice. Just generic pep talks such as the parent's and I didn't want to be a "quitter". So I kept going and beating a dead horse.
Here's my 2 cents:
If you do not have paid IT experience in the last 12 months, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to get another job. Over 12 months? Just leave the field. That's how bad it is. I know - I lived it.
Moving from one role to another in IT is very difficult. Hiring managers want recent experience in exactly what they're looking for. If you do not fit that their requirements, you're pretty much screwed. I've been out of work for years trying to get back into IT, taking classes, networking, and I can tell you that I wasted too much time and money. Being out of work is the kiss of death and there's no way of getting back in.
Then after years of struggling to get hired, I was finally offered this advice from an IT manager - "maybe you should think of getting out of IT". Finally someone who was blunt and gave me feedback.I wish I got is YEARS ago!
Sometimes, the most prudent thing to do is give up and change course.
P.S. And the implication from others that I'm somehow defective, really wears on you to the point where you start to believe it. And I can tell you, the IT field is the biggest offender.
No. If you can't retrain (and you don't know that), it because you've forgotten how to learn, not because of your age. The only way to find out is to try.
But be aware that, at 40, you've crossed over into what passes for middle age in the development world. This isn't necessarily fatal, but it does mean that you can't afford to leave a current job before having the next one secured. Being over 40, having an out-of-date skill set, and not having a current job (in no particular order) are all strikes against you if they apply. You can overcome one; you might overcome two; all three is more than you want to face.
Believe me, I know. I was laid off just before 9/11, with no web or database experience, and that's all anyone wanted then. I never did get back into IT, i spite of taking several classes, and ended up retiring out of retail sales. Even the hiring mangers near my age wouldn't take a chance on an over-40 with no working background in what they were doing.
And, yes, I KNOW that age discrimination is illegal. That doesn't keep it from happening.
Personally, I've never understood the idea of needing to be "trained" to program or build software or systems. Why not just figure out how to do it? If you can't figure out how to solve problems and be valuable in something besides VB.NET, then maybe age isn't really the issue.
Tell that to hiring managers and HR.
I'm a 43 year old programmer, and I love programming. My problem is that my strongest expertise is Lotus Notes / Domino development and administration, which is loosing market share faster than the Titanic lost passengers. So now for my work I'm learning to master the Microsoft suite. But the reality is, best practices, techniques, understanding of the business needs, workflow, and design all transcend the languages you write in.
.. If you do you love it, practice and play with object oriented programming techniques, update your understanding of the available tools, AND start with Visual Basic .NET since it's closest to what you are already familiar with. Anything you learn in VB.net will easily translate to any of the other .net languages when the need arises.
In other words, I'm only re-learning teeny tiny bit
If you were ever excellent at those things, it will take little time for it to click again. If you weren't, then you probably don't love it, and if you don't love it you will never be able to compete with outsourced guys who also don't love it, but will work for peanuts.
So
Again though, if you don't love it, it's never too late to find your passion, try something else.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
What would you do if ./ answered 'Yes'?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Parent poster basically won the internet award for the day, heed his words.
Programming at it's core is creative work, and if that's what you love you need to stick with it a form that fulfills your passion and talents. For example, with your time in the field consider if you have what it takes to do more senior development work:
- it's not management though you will be responsible for code review and progress meetings
- you're less code-monkey and more architect which lessens the burden of bringing peak knowledge of new languages to the table
Q/A is also a relatively good side of things to consider. You need a functional understanding of code, but the work focus is shifted to your analysis skills on how real-world scenarios will beat the living tar out of someone's project :)
At this stage you're going to want to recognize your experience with software and the environments they run in as much as being able to make f(x)=y. It's very honest to recognize that you're not a people person, but that doesn't mean well-paying specialist jobs like what's above are out of your reach.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
I am 50.
Since the age of 40 *I* have learned:
VB.NET
C#
Java
SOAP and XML
SSRS
As well as continuing to keep up with the IBM AS400/iSeries/Power7 platform I've been on since 1989. It isn't easy keeping up with technology, and personally I'm starting to get weary of it, and would like to transition to more of a BA role. But it is possible to do it, if you have the will to do it.
Proverbs 21:19
You know, 40 wasn't where it it me. It was about 46 or so. And then it HIT me. I love learning, so don't get me wrong, but a couple years ago, I really noticed that stuff was just not sticking like it used to. Abstraction helps, but specifics come and go. I no longer try to remember them, Google search everything.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm 47 and was a Novell consultant until 3 years ago. I managed to persuade a friend who owned a small ISP to let me virtualize his infrastructure (5+ years old crappy boxes that miraculously had not fallen over in that time).
Bought 2 hosts and a SAN from an IBM reseller. Built it all completely from scratch learning from a book (this one) using iSCSI to connect to the SAN. Rebuilt it twice or three times to make sure I'd captured all the steps.
Put it into production, virtualizing all the server that would be virtualizable (and old Slackware definitely wasn't one of those) and creating new Centos templates for easy deployment of the stuff that was on Slackware. Added QNAP boxes for Disaster Recovery.
After 8-9 weeks my friend's business model had changed beyond all recognition and I had brand-new up-to-date skills in virtualization and a reference site.
I'm now working for a consultancy doing VMware, SANs and Office365 migrations. My skills and experience are improving every day and Novell is far behind in the junkpile.
Oh and I'm going to get certified for Windows 2012 because [fighting words on Slashdot]Windows 2012 and Hyper-V rocks[/fighting words on Slashdot] and it cannot be ignored even by Linuxheads like me. My company wants my skills and my long experience to make them money, and I want them to let me gain skills and experience and get paid for it. Eventually I'll move on.
There's a ton of free stuff (Microsoft Virtual Academy, for example) for people to learn new stuff and even Microsoft let you play with Windows 2012 and Azure for a few months at no cost. Playing with Xen or KVM or Openstack costs nothing
Bottom line? 40 is a state of mind for people clinging to their 30s. It's not anywhere near the junkpile unless you do nothing about your situation except be afraid to change. Oh, and the key to re-engineering your skillset and your life in your 40s is mens sana in corpore sano. Tone down the drinking, leave the drugs alone and learn new stuff
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I wouldn't worry about it. Really, if you're not really good at the current .NET stuff, don't sweat it.
.NET framework. Then the wireless network drivers required a different version of the .net framework. To top it off, the video drivers required even ANOTHER version of the .NET framework! JUST TO GET BASIC OS FUNCTIONALITY!
.NET.....
I recently had to install Windows from scratch on some brand new dell laptops. I try to keep the amount of cruft low, but I was defeated when I found out that the drivers for the motion sensor, a little sensor that tells the hard drive that the laptop is falling and parks the head, required a 400+ MB install of the
Don't worry... You're apparently not the only one who can't understand
Here's a hint. If you don't want to be sidelined as you get older, you must take all those years of experience and make them valuable.
People will hire you, at good rates, if you provide value. If they can get the same from a 20 year old, then they're not going to pay you enough to make it worth it. You have to give them something they can't get from a 20 year old.
Experience.
That means being better at your job than a 20 year old. Knowing when to make the right moves and when to mea culpa. Knowing what NOT to do. Becoming good at your job.
The original poster seems to have made the mistake that he didn't stay on top of things. And now he has a long hard haul to get back up to speed, plus he needs go the extra mile that makes him worth paying for.
If you didn't actually gain experience... that is, you just did the same things over and over without really thinking about it... then you might as well go flip burgers.
Otherwise, take control over your future.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
That guy has problems. Age being the least of them.
20 minutes into the future
Avoid technologies that don't easily transfer to other technologies; VB is hellishly rough for being a bit of a dead end, albeit terrifically useful at what it does. Leverage the .NET part of your resume, and spend a few months learning C#. It's not terrible, and will make you a better VB developer at the very least. At the most, you can pivot out, and do a wider variety of tasks - for better pay - in C# than in VB.
So you have two choice:
Do something else, or decide you are going to suck it up, and get a job at an organization with pretty fixed hours. So you can enjoy the other aspects of your life.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem is not whether he can actually retrain himself, but whether someone will hire him for his new .NET skills. 40 year old junior - or even regular developers - are rare: they normally want to be paid more than kids out of school, but don't have the productivity of the old .NET hands. Furthermore, even if he were to become a .NET expert, many companies feel that it is more efficient to hire a kid with some .NET experience right out of school and pay them a pittance, instead of forking of lots of money for an experienced developer.
A developer at age 40 should be getting very concerned about his/her career path. Old coders are not very common, and there's not much interest in hiring them. Architect is a very different skill set, and something that people are willing to pay an old person lots of money for.
So my recommendation: retrain, yes, but retrain with an eye on running developers, not being one. And by the way, being a people person is not a requirement for managing people. The question is, can you get them to do what they need to do, and can you remove roadblocks that hinder their productivity? Oh, and if you want to go into management, get an MBA. It's just a piece of paper, but unfortunately, it's an important one.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I went and got a Data Resource Management post-grad in my late 30s and retrained to Bioinformatics in my 40s. Next up is a PhD in EE.
Look, let's be honest here, you have to expect you'll be working into your 70s. If I had saved 22 percent of my income in retirement plans starting in my 20s like I do now, then I could just retire on my military fallback, but the only people who retire at 40 are firefighters and cops.
Do what you love
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I’m 49, jumped into LAMP from .net 4 years ago and loving it. Either learning new things trips your trigger or it doesn’t. If you’re just burned out and don’t get excited with new techie stuff, switch careers – the language syntax isn’t the problem.
It sounds more like you need to figure you what you want. What are you passionate about? What do dream of? Do it! Take big bag of knowledge and experience you earned and apply it to something you love.
Apples and Oranges
If you tried coming in from the outside, you would never have gotten past HR and the hiring manager.
Therefore, your situation is completely irrelevent.
I'm 48 and I used to joke with my wife that I'd need to grow a pony tail when I was 40. Still don't have one but I haven't had to look for work so I'm not ruling it out.
Fair or not, software development is seen as a young person's (mostly male) occupation. And regardless of the field you're in, there's often this natural progression towards management that's not a good fit for everyone, especially in technical fields. So whether or not you're as capable as a younger person, you're at a disadvantage if you're looking for work as a developer.
But age won't stop you from getting an interview, so I think honing your interview skills would be extremely beneficial regardless of what line of work you decide to pursue.
As to whether or not you decide to stick with software is up to you. The most important question is do you enjoy doing it? If so, then by all means, bring your skills up to date and never, never let them get out of date. Don't become just a java developer or a php developer. Be a developer period who views the language as merely a tool. Part of your job will be to constantly learning how to use new tools.
You know, 40 wasn't where it it me. It was about 46 or so. And then it HIT me. I love learning, so don't get me wrong, but a couple years ago, I really noticed that stuff was just not sticking like it used to. Abstraction helps, but specifics come and go. I no longer try to remember them, Google search everything.
I'm 42 now, and have had a full-time .NET dev job for the last year. Before that, I was going back to grad school for a degree in Computer Science. I loved the education environment, but left because a) I needed the money (loans were stacking up), and b) this was just about the ideal position.
On top of that, I have never worked with .NET before, but the business was willing to take a risk because they needed the experience and were setting up a shop to take over a lot of legacy tech.
Turns out it was the best move I could make. There's only one other developer in the group my age; the rest are in their late 20s to early 30s--several with .NET only experience. But the other "old" guy and myself are pretty much running the place from an expertise point of view*, because depth of experience can matter more than single-language expertise. An array is an array, string functions work pretty much the same across the board, and it's more a matter of Googling "How do I do X in .NET?" than trying to figure out what the hell you need to do in the first place.
If you love learning, you never get stale; if you're tired of or worried about learning, find something that will excite you enough to want to learn how to make it happen.
* This is not to say that I am all that and a bag of chips--I struggle with the way .NET handles certain things, but I enjoy learning how to do it. And, if something isn't working, I can usually figure out what is going wrong on a fundamental level instead of just throwing in a cookbook answer and saying, "Magic happens..."
Also, I am sure that in a heavy .NET shop that's been around for a while, the story would have ended with me as "that old guy who didn't know what LINQ was," but my point is that it's not all doom and gloom.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
I'm 45 and a little over two years ago I got back into an engineering role after over a decade in management. It's never too late.
You don't need to be retrained. Microsoft has a whole set of courses designed to get developers familiar with older versions of .NET up to speed on the latest version. It costs about $2500 and your employer will usually pay. The course is only 5 days and it's pretty easy. .NET has only gotten easier over the years... that's kind of the point. But you need to be willing to change the way you do things. The worst part of those classes is the dudes that come in there whos experience is all in Cobol or something and they question everything the instructor tells them.... "That's not REAL programming" blah blah blah... shut the fuck up, things are done differently now, get over it.
was it not sticking, or did you get to the age where you realised you didn't give quite as much a damn over the next damn thing that's been pushed as the next big thing only to realise it was just crap?
That's what happened to me, but fortunately I had already given up bothering to learn all the new nonsense that is designed to make you buy the next version of whatever toolset they want you to buy, and concentrated my efforts on actually making stuff that works (properly, ie I no longer really cared what technology I used, the product was the thing for me).
Mind, we're now doing an "agile" system that isn't anywhere near as agile as the iterative development I used to do 15 years ago... and the tooling is auto-conf magic bits that "just work" (yeah, right, until it doesn't). So maybe it wasn't me but the dumbed down kiddie tech we're pushed to work with.
I'm over 50, and I started a new job in a new area of technology. If you have to ask if you are too old to retrain, that presents two possibilities to me 1) You've got serious self-esteem issues: get some counseling 2) You don't really like learning new things, in which case development is not really for you, and support really might be the right choice.
I'm a 40-year-old developer [...] Am I Too Old To Retrain?
You've still got atleast 25 working years left in you; that's longer than any your 24-year old collegues have lived so far and it's probably not even halfway through your entire career from higher education to retirement.
Stop wasting time asking silly questions and go retrain if that's what you want to do. You still have plenty of time to have a completely new career equal (atleast in duration) to your current one.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Sounds to me like you have no desire to learn on your own. I am 35 and constantly learn the newest thing if for nothing else because it INTERESTS me. A career in IT might not be for you, outside of a support role of course, since you don't have that drive that separates those that advance and those that settle in and get rusty only to find themselves obsolete with skills that no longer matter to the company or sector as a whole once your current project is done.
My Mom went back to college to finish her math ed degree my freshman year of college (nothing like going to college with your Mom!) She ended up graduating a few years later with a degree in CS and a job offer (up to that point she was terrified of computers, let alone programming). About 10 years later, I got a job through her at a video game shop (she was my project lead). She now specializes in mobile development. At the end of the day, YOUR only as old as old as YOU mentally place YOURSELF (Mom is about 12).
I'm 63 (cut me in half and count the rings), and have been doing maintenance programming for 40 years. If you can't learn to translate to new language and styles, then you should never have gotten into the business.
This is the equivalent of saying "I want to work in an industry that constantly changes, but i don't want to have to keep with those changes." The human brain is capable of learning new things until the day we die. Only the individual who convinces them-self that they can't do something can't do it.
If your primarily a VB developer then you really should retrain. VB is a language that was designed for rapid prototyping, mainly to model your later developed "real" program. i have yet to see any VB developed program that I considered well put together. Granted I am often amazed by what VB can do. However, I am often disappointed by the number of bugs, crashes, and other stability issues these programs have. And .net is a platform that was obsolete before it was even developed, while it was a good idea Java is far more mature than .net and is better at doing the one thing .net was designed to do. (platform independence) If Microsoft had developed .net interpreters for Linux systems and Apple products then I might have given .net a serious look, instead they left it to 3rd parties to do. Thus .net was underpowered, and Java even with oracles takeover is still better than .net. If you really want to specialize in outdated languages then look into ADA, Cobol, or Algol at least with these languages you will have the option of developing for older systems, like some banks, or some government jobs. It's cheaper to just hire a an developer who wanted to learn one of these languages than upgrade the system.
Old coders are *very* common. ...
Everyone who started coding in 1950 is now *old* considered by mainstream standards.
New coders only know new tools, but have no particular new skill. As a matter of fsct new coders (below age of 30) likely have no experience in anything (except a certain platform/language). For solving problems you need problem solving skills, abstraction and an ability to express that. This comes by experience. Experience implies age.
The main reason why this original question is not insightfull is: someone focuses on one platform (.Net) which runs basically only on one OS (windows) which implies: he has no clue about computing even while he is already 40, cough cough.
At that age I would expect some mainframe assembly experience, some old school languages like fortran or cobol, perhaps smalltalk, but certainly C or Pascal or Modula 2. With over ten years experience I would expect basic knowledge about UML, some random agile method, some also randome more traditional method of project planning/conducting/managing.
So: do you have those experiences? If so, what are you scared about?
If not, hello! What are you doing in the software business anyway? Running for jobs where some one told you they are paid well? That only brings you so far
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When I think back at the times I most enjoyed, it was when I was engrossed in designing or coding, whether circuitry or software. Is that true for you? Questions such as that are what you need to ask yourself. If not, well, try to think of other options.
We have engineers here learning entire new systems and languages at age 60. We enjoy it - it's one of the benefits of the job.
If you're looking at it as a chore, then the answer is that you should probably be looking at something else.
The good news is that with the way fads come and go, he can probably catch up by skipping a cycle. That is a key to remaining relevant as an older developer. The superior experience tells us which fad cycles we can skip while deepening our knowledge of more useful long term things.
In 2005 I was a successful vb developer having lived and breathed basic since my freshman year in hs 1980.
.Net 3.5, I realized that I needed to take a second look.
.Net Development, you will never want for work.
A funny story:
It was 1988, my mentor from Brookhaven National Laboratory was pestering me over using QuickBasic 4.5 versus Borland Turbo C. He wrote two programs that compared the efficiency of each language and showed me the results. The C guys would tell you the results. Well when I looked at the code:
Keep in mind I'm using C# so it isn't C but to a VB programmer it looks as insane:
for (int i = 0; i
{
Console.WriteLine(i.ToString());
}
Please don't flame me on code mistakes, I'm not being paid to code right now and 3/4 through a beautiful Coors 9/16Oz pack.
When the ASP.Net Bible came out with only C# code for
I can promise you this, If you take the plunge on C# and even come close to mastering the art of enterprise C# /
C# kenobi your are my only hope. To all of the VB.Net developers out there who disagree, I say, "i++"
"The only thing worse then existing, Is not existing"
... but you may be stuck in a rut. I think the aphorism "Adapt or die" applies particularly well to IT. I turned 44 this year, and I've been working with business systems since 1993. From then to now I've managed System/3x minicomputers, AIX big iron, Linux and FreeBSD servers, and of course the plethora of Windows operating systems from WfW 3.11 and NT 3.5 to current. At times during every era, I surely thought that I would never be doing anything else (sometimes with smug satisfaction (UNIX days), or with fatalism (Windows systems management)). In every case moving from one area of expertise to another required learning how to apply the knowledge I'd gained previously with new stuff. I think the only reason I still do IT work is because there's so much to learn, and the learning keeps me motivated and interested. .NET development and you aren't interested in starting over with another platform maybe you should look to moving outside of development. Put your years of platform experience to use doing something within the IT field but outside of development. Generalists who actually know how things work and why are hard to come by these days; it seems everyone's a specialist who only knows how to do tasks associated with their chosen sphere. Smaller companies especially need people who know how to do a whole lot of things, and who can come up to speed quickly when something new presents itself.
If you can't (or won't) get with the times in
Adapt or die.
Just nitpicking: programming is not a creative work. It is doing the obvious nevessary steps to transform a requirement into code. Or fix a bug.
The creative work is called: development or design or architecture.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Am I Too Old To Retrain?
If you have to ask that question, I'd say yes. If you believe you are too old for X or Y, then you are. If you believe you are not too old, then you are not. I'm 43 years old, and I keep retraining myself all the time. I forced myself from C++/CORBA to Java and did that for 10 years. Then I forced myself back to C++ for embedded development, being doing that for almost 2 years. Now I'm forcing myself into developing Python for process automation (and I'm going to find ways to force my way to use Python for testing of embedded C++ code.) All at work.
Sometimes we make it happen. Sometimes we fail. But such is life. If you want to do something else, you develop a concrete plan and go for it. If that doesn't work, then you find something else to do. You keep moving. You seek what you want, pushing shit, red tape and people out of your way if necessary (w/o involving back stabbing mind you.) And if that doesn't get you anywhere, then you change your goals.
Want to retrain yourself? Go for it. Want to change careers? Go for it. Want to give up everything and go, I dunno, to the Amazons or Tibet for some navel gazing? Go for it.
There are things that naturally get in the way. Family, debt, sickness, etc. Those you can manage one way or another despite being actual roadblocks.
But age? Your determination or lack thereof establishes how much too old you are for X or Y. So the real question is not "Am I too old?" The real questions are "Do I know what I want?", "How badly I want it?" and "Do I have the balls to go for it and give it a try?"
As Michael Jordan once put it "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
What a completely fucking useless upgrade treadmill - chase the dragon just to please the hardware and the systems software developers who will benefit from it, even when what came before was already more than adequate. No time for depth of learning because you're too busy learning API changes.
I can't see why anyone still wants to be a software developer.
Having spent 40 years forcing someone else to make decisions on your behalf, you do it one last time with this post, and then you do what your country needs you to do. You get off of your ass and start making decisions for others. You start your own business, your own service, your own product, or your own project.
You no longer need someone else to schedule your day, tell you what to wear, and to prioritize your actions. And since you've got the experience of having someone do that for 40 years, you can now, finally, dress yourself.
It can be anything in the technology sector, or anything outside of the technology centre. The ability to make decisions is important for any community. If you haven't learned how to make decisions by 40, then you're a lost cause to your community. Move to a country that needs 40 year-old robots. There are plenty.
Couldn't that be said of any "creation" that fulfils a requirement? How about a dishwasher? Arguably not that creative, it's a machine that does the washing up so you don't have to. Or is the construction merely "programming" using physical parts?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
As for me, at 59, I am still programming professionally and learning whatever I need to get the job done
The most important skill a programmer has is logical problem solving
The particular details of languages and tools are relatively unimportant
I definitely don't consider myself to be "too old"
Instead, focus on products and get them off the ground. Far better to create your OWN company. If you do not have business experience, then focus on finding a partner who does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So I'd like to just add this bit of wisdom, "After 20 years of bouncing from job to job and never liking any of them, you have to start to realize that perhaps the cause of the problem... is you."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm 48 and have done primarily C++ for 20+ years. I was laid off in March and immediately downloaded Visual Studio and dove into C#/.Net like my life depended on it. I added .NET projects that I was peripherally involved with to my CV, and I wrote software all day every day, moving through Winforms, then to MVC. I also published a series of articles based on the software I wrote, about 15 in all. By the time I got into WPF I was hired into a position with a great salary and whole new hat-full of technologies: Oracle, ASP/.Net, NHibernate, EntityFramework, etc. Every time I touch a new one it goes onto my CV's skills matrix (which doesn't mention years, simply level of competency, which when you have 20 years experience competency comes very quickly).
The main reason I got away with it is because when I was asked (sometimes up-front, sometimes in the interview) to solve a software problem in Visual Studio, I was able to demonstrate very strong competency. Of the four demos I wrote, all four times I advanced to the next stage, and I got into three interviews. Of perhaps 20 other roles I applied for, I secured two interviews, one C++, and one because the manager misread my CV. In fact, the role I secured was a mistake on my part, as it sought XHTML/Javascript/CSS and I accidentally applied for it when I thought I was applying for a different one that was a better match and said they would ask for a demo. So when a request for a demo came in I thought nothing of it, sent it through, and when preparing for the interview I realised to my horror what I had done and prepared myself to crash and burn. But they saw the big picture and two weeks in, I'm up to my neck in ASP.Net/Oracle and producing good stuff.
Overall it took precisely six months to retrain and get employed. My first successful demo was two months after I started and yielded an offer with a top consulting company when the next position opens up, my second success a month later disappeared when the paperwork went upstairs for signature, and then it took two more months to seal the deal.
Sounds like you're experiencing some burnout. I say take a break - the dip in the management pool wasn't far enough away. Do something else entirely for a 12-18 months. I did this, and after a couple years I found I had all the motivation I needed to get my development skills honed up. As others have pointed out, many of the skills you learned years ago can be very valuable, provided you figure out how to apply them to the new world order. Getting out of the game for a while will give you the perspective you need. I'm not saying this is easy or even financially smart ... you'll probably take a significant cut in pay to do the "new thing" and when you come back to development you will be competing with younger folks ... but you'll have the same hunger and passion that they have (maybe even more), so you *will* be able to compete. Best of luck!
I find that self-confidence (which I sure as Hell did not possess when I was young) comes with age: we discover ourselves through years of research and practice.
Self-confidence is what makes the difference between:
(a) Answering questions about your resume during an interview, and
(b) Using the interviewer's questions as a starting point, then talking about whatever you think will persuade the interviewer to love you so much that they hire you on the spot.
And yes: a touch of grey, worn with pride, enhances the effect.
-kgj
Someone mod this up. Shouldn't have posted anon my friend!
I dunno. I'm 41, and I still love tech and still love learning. But with age my horizons have broadened and tech isn't the central focus of my life anymore. It doesn't bother me if some great new thing comes out and I don't hear about it until a few days or weeks later.
And my learning is much more based on practical matters these days. When I learned Perl, I did it because it sounded cool and I just plain wanted to learn it. Now I don't invest the time unless it's either going to make me money, or I'm going to put it to use in my home somehow.
I can definitely relate to the OP. I still love technology and learning, but my interests are much more broad these days and I find it more satisfying to spend a weekend relaxing on a boat or hiking in the woods than sitting at a keyboard learning some obscure language just to be able to say I know it.
There are many companies that offer training. I've been looking at SetFocus for years, but am worried about no pay during training and having to repay a loan.
Other than the part about hating .Net, this is the answer.
I'm in my 40's and am a .Net programmer (and enjoy the Microsoft space) and I continue to learn new things every day. If you aren't going to learn, the yes, get out. Otherwise, go for it. There *ARE* still companies using VB.Net -- as a consultant, I've been on more than one project that uses it. While I prefer C#, there's jobs out there for someone of the OPs skillset.
42 year old developer here. The trade-off I've always thought this kind of job had was you are in constant learning mode. That means I try some time each day on something new. Either improving what I do know, learning something new, reading, etc.
To the mod, how the fuck is that flamebait unless you are on the payroll of the aforementioned companies?
"The mob is fickle, brother." -- Gladiator.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
There are a lot of businesses out there that would love to have talented old school developers. I was shocked at how grateful they are for me since I left corporate and now work in a business that has 10 employees, but I code in my comfort zone, make more than I did in corporate, and get awesome feedback.
And I'm closer to 50 than 40. If you can't learn on the go (like I gladly do) then use your experience to mentor younger coders , provide great plans for coding projects, and enjoy less stress in your life.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I am a 48 year old high pressure welder with a ged and a screwed up hand.
I can no longer weld.
Rather than go to work as a Walmart Greeter I have begun a fairly heavy course of study in networking and system admin.
I am 3/4 of the way through now, and have already gained a couple of decent, marketable certifications.
A couple more I need before I hit the job market, but many of my classmates have already been employed and are making some decent money.
Age is not the limiting factor, you are.
Decide if you want it enough to make it happen or not, and if you DO, do it.
...in three months. I've been developing software for over 25 years now. My manager is the only person near my age in my group of seven developers (not sure if she is younger or older). Everyone else is around thirty or even younger. We're mostly using C# with .Net 4.0 right now and have just started looking at .Net 4.5. (We're held back a bit by software we have to be compatible with.) It's still interesting to me.
Forty is too old?! You young whippersnapper! You're just hitting your mid-life crisis! Go out and buy a little red sports car and get it over with!
Oh, yeah -- GET OFF OF MY LAWN!!!
I'm 58. Started programming in 1969 in high school. Got my B.S. in 1978, Masters in 1985. They didn't even have "object oriented programming" in 1985, not to mention about a dozen other major technologies. Yet I'm still at the top of my game because I constantly buy books, adopt new technology and educate myself. There's no other way. A foundation in real computer science (not just programming, but algorithms, data structures, design patterns, analysis of programs, etc.) is critical. With that, you can adapt to new technology quickly. It's not easy, but it's part of what you signed up for. Go for it.
I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it? Do I give up a career in technology now?
Yes! You should give up now. Actually you should have given up when you first tried to write a program. You know nothing about technology. You have nothing to do with technology. You have participated in a campaign that tried to replace actual development of technology with monkeying around in a small, fake environment built by one company to contain its own version of "technology", "progress" and "culture". Guess what? You know nothing outside of this environment, and the company that created it did not even bother keeping it consistent with your all-fake knowledge. You looked for an easy job, and you got your wish at the price of remaining ignorant about everything except a carefully built environment that contains damaged minds of people like yourself.
You are an embodiment of everything that is destroying technology, and we, all engineers, all programmers, all scientists of the world, are happy to see you gone.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Well, I ain't the mod, but I'd have flamebaited it too. There isn't a "flame" mod. Hell, my previous post was flame, I expect it to be downvoted, I even want it downvoted because it's addressed solely to the person I answered, not stinking up the general conversation like GP's. Actually, on second thought "redundant" would have been more accurate, you didn't make any point GGGP didn't, and he was both more detailed and more likely to actually do some good.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I'm pushing 40 and I know as well as when I was 20 that tech is what I love to do and that's what I am going to do.
So true. I'm late 50's, and my best gig was in 2008. A year after that, I pulled off a brilliant four day perl hack. Find something you've been itching to bang your head against and go with it. You'll regardless be far ahead of the twenty-something know-nothings who barely speak English but will work long hours for peanuts. Then sell yourself on your strengths.
Either that, or enjoy IT as a hobby and retrain yourself in something that will pay the bills (I like Heavy Equipment Operator; big toys, good demand, decent wage, easily learned :-).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The best is yet to come, my friend.
At the risk of flamebait, let me advise that old age and treachery will always beat youth and skill.
I look forward to the treachery.
Largely because 8086 assembler is a forgotten, black art for me.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You're not too old at 40 (hell, 60 or 80 wouldn't be too old)....but if you haven't been keeping up with technology for your own interest, then you probably don't have the aptitude for it.
or maybe it's just .NET that doesn't interest you - in that case, find some area of software development that DOES interest you and start playing/learning.
and if playing with and learning technology seems like a chore then you really don't have the aptitude.
sorry to sound so harsh but for programming, aptitude and motivation count for a lot more than training. training can, at best, get you started - an introduction. you won't master it without the personal interest in the subject.
I've been in the IT industry for 17 years. I've gotten to the point where I'm just getting burned out and have reached the maximum salary cap of where I'll ever be without a degree. Plus, I found out some time ago that all the new Microsoft certifications will start expiring. That's not cool. As such, I took the plunge in a few years ago and started going back to school to finish my BS in mechanical engineering. I'll be done in three years (going to school part time and still working full time). I can't wait until the day when I can shift gears.
and polluting your code with LINQ everywhere looks ugly, and more ugly than SQL itself.
Why not a single layer interface that abstracts your access to the DB, so that it could be changed in future if LINQ turns out shit and dosnt scale, or if you move to redis or memcache.
Heres a question, if .NET is so great, why isnt 99% of the windows GUI and desktop + IE + non speed critical code written all in C# ? Didnt MS abort converting 90% of the OS to .NET ?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
its your attitude, if you don't mind my saying. I'm finishing my CS degree at 38 and then on to my masters, at or near the top of my class. Not to brag, but I can because I believe I can, 100%. You can learn new skills if you believe you can, it is as simple as that. Its not that being older means being less capable, but it generally means you have spent more time getting in a comfortable rut that you don't actually want to leave. But it is 100% mental. You are still capable. Frankly I love when people tell me I can't, or I am too old; it drives me.
Part of what you say is right. There will always be a new BS system that is hot and new and whatever, but with the experience you have by now, you should be able to make good decisions about using them or wait until they're mature.
Tools WILL help you, until they don't, but at that moment your experience should help you understand the problem and help you solve it.
"concentrated my efforts on actually making stuff that works" makes me think you're not just making fancy websites. If so, your experience with design patterns and things like that should give you an intellectual edge over the new kid.
In your career, when you were young, you might have stumbled upon that old man doing Fortran (at least I did and he was good at it), but that was the only thing he was good at. It's good to keep up with technology, otherwise you will become that man doing Fortran and it WILL be you and not the dumbed down kiddie and he will be doing the cool projects and not you.
Privacy is terrorism.
In terms of problem solving, you're probably a better programmer now than you've ever been, even if you haven't done it for awhile. Programming is like any other kind of art that way. If you were any good during the .net 2.0 era, you're probably better now, even if you don't feel your skills are fresh. That's part of the problem working with Microsoft languages. You've also made it to 40, and you haven't totally lost your mind, or moved to the woods yet. This is also a good thing. There's hope.
.net 2.0 development going on. VB hasn't really changed a lot since the first .net. The api is a little more sophisticated now, but it's nothing to be afraid of. If you're feeling burnt on Microsoft technologies, you might want to check out Python. There's this great book called "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw. It's a thing of beauty. Of the popular open source languages, it's always been my feeling that Python is the easiest to learn if you're coming from a VB background. There are moments where it feels like VB short hand. And it's incredibly trendy right now. Lots of work in and around it at the moment.
There's a lot of ageism on Slashdot. A lot of 20 somethings that are very nervous about getting older. This is pervasive in the industry, and you shouldn't let the rhetoric get to you. Some of the best programmers with the freshest skillsets that I know are in their 50's or older. It's truly the kind of thing you can do until you die... if you want to.
As far as updating the skillset, I happen to know for a fact that there is still a lot of
So anyway, my point is, you'll be fine. Just don't stop having fun with it.
Take care.
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I totally agree with you. But also as an architect, you need to keep up with technology and actually WORK with it to understand the possibilities it offers.
Personally I'm following that route as well. Improving my architecture skills, my project management skills as well as my coaching skills. All that because I, like you, don't believe just being able to code it a good strategy after 40.
Privacy is terrorism.
Everything in Windoze 7 OS is built to the .NET API, and probably most of Vista. OS components were never meant to run exclusively off the CLR VM of .NET. All the huge legacy applications MS makes money on were never going to refactored to operate off of CLR. You don't have to run off of CLR to be .NET compatible, or run exclusively with .NET APIs. .NET isn't great for OS code; .NET is great for ENTERPRISE APPLICATION development. A large corporation doesn't have to be limited to one language while running off the same APIs, and the previous codebase is still binary compatible.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
40 is well into middle age. (The average male lives to something like 75. So take out 10 years for the "middle age" decade and divide by two. Middle age is your early thirties to early forties). So it's reasonable to be looking toward the end of your career and usefulness around that time. Maybe not so fatalistically, but at least to be pragmatic about it.
Also, it was always asserted (though I'm not entirely clear what it is based on -- I guess physiology and brain response) that you become progressively worse at learning after the age of 25.
If you're going to be a great developer, you will have learned everything of importance by age 40. Who cares about specific APIs, frameworks, etc? You've seen them all a hundred times before. You approach everything in terms of speed of light, concurrency decisions, failure modes, user expectations. You know a thousand algorithms, but know there are only 5 or so, the rest are just special cases. You point out that n log n sort is pointless because you have a DAG, you've seen this error a hundred times before. You can hack out a 30 line routine that runs perfectly the first time because you wrote a unit test first that hit all the edge cases: the implementation was totally obvious before you even coded it. And you take your junior developers out for drinks now and then, and you talk about code and debate how to solve problems.
If this is what you enjoy, you will be paid well at age 40, 50, 60, or more. Don't enjoy it? Switch careers.
he has no clue about computing even while he is already 40, cough cough. At that age I would expect some mainframe assembly experience, some old school languages like fortran or cobol, perhaps smalltalk, but certainly C or Pascal or Modula 2.
Dude. Mainframes? Fortran? Cobol? I'm 39, started coding professionally in 96.... I haven't touched anything but Turbo Pascal, VB, C#, C++, and a few scripting languages since then. We had PCs and internet connections and everything back then....sorry i've never touched a punch card or cobol or a mainframe before.
40 is well into middle age.
Forty these days is prime of life. Some go to post-100 with modern medicine and exercise regimens. It's not like it was a hundred thousand years ago when they could only expect to be old men at thirty.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I would never say it's too late to learn something new. I'm 52 and taught myself Android programming and now have several app out and my resume is getting lots of attention. I might add that I hadn't programmed professionally for several years in between the Android apps and my previous programming job. Computers are all about learning and staying current. Embrace the madness.
I'm reminded of greybeard Cobol programmers who're cleaning up demanding avaricious wages to maintain ancient COBOL programs these days.
"Your day will come!" :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
It's pretty stupid how employers discriminate based on age, especially in the computer programming field. For crying out loud, this is not hard(soar, bruised, tired body) labor work where you have to worry about your body finally giving out because you pushed too hard for the past 20 years in construction, auto mechanic, refrigeration mechanic, etc..... This is a freaking desk job sitting on your ass typing code, give me a damn break. I know people over 40 and 50 who are professional software developers and have no plan in retiring from it. I know people who are over 35 and over and just entering in the field. You still have 27 more years before retirement, if your sick of it choose something else, if you are not just keep pushing yourself. I have family in europe who are 70-80 and they are still freaking working. If you have memory problems you need to see a doctor it's usually from bad diet, infections, thyroid problems, blood flow problems. Exorcise, take a long walk which improves blood flow.
a) Are you still interested in software development?
b) Are you going to be financially better off in software development?
c) Are you going to be career stable in software development?
Consider those and if you know you are a decent developer that should weigh alot on your decision.
Best of luck!
As a .Net programmer, you contribute to the power Microsoft holds over the computer industry. Please stop.
The OP said he was disinclined to go into project management. And MBAs now are a dime a dozen. Its certainly not worth spending a crap load of money to get a piece of paper that no one will hire.
As much as I hate to be dogmatically negative, I'd say he's too old to be retrained for coding jobs. .NET. If he had bothered to learn something outside his vocational concentration, he'd never be posting his question. .NET techniques/additions, and scrounging around for C# contract work to put on his resume. The career life of a 40+ year old coder is not bright at this point, but he shouldn't have a problem finding low paying work, even when competing with 22 year olds and overseas coding shops.
1) Look very carefully at what he said: he specialized in VB.NET. He never bothered to learn C#, which is a centerpiece language for
2) The only expense to him at this point should be a few books and his time. One shouldn't need to go back to college in to learn how to use C#; particularly if you were adept with computing concepts, algorithms, and development methodologies. If he thinks he needs to obtain paid certification to be "hireable" as a programmer, then he's not really cut out to be a programmer. If he feels the need to ask opinions over whether to make an effort to stay in the industry, then he's as good as done. A professional in his position would be learning C#, latest
3) Frankly, if he was competent at math, he wouldn't even need to retrain on C#. Retrain on F#, and get a job coding for quants, labs, and large organizations.
4) The only thing I can see him doing that is still computer related, and not programming, would be to recertify as a network administrator. That environment is unlikely to change radically, and there will always be networks needing to upgrade. But you'd have to ask network techs if that is worth bothering at this point.
5) He'd be better off (if living in an non-union state) to retrain as a plumber or electrician. I would imagine after a decade, he'd make more money doing that, than as a programmer.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The average life expectancy of a male is not "post-100". It is 78.
An an open source supporter, you devalue the work we do. So, fair is fair.
Direct hit, every line!
Made me laugh!
-kgj
If you're going to be a great developer, you will have learned everything of importance by age 40. Who cares about specific APIs, frameworks, etc? You've seen them all a hundred times before.
Yes, that was the point I made. There is a difference between learning new things as we get older (35, 45, 55, 65) and learning iterations on things we already know. Learning a new programming language on top of those you already know, at 40, is not the same as picking up a new instrument with no prior musical education. I suspect that when we talk about the difficulty of learning new things as we age, we mean *truly new things* with entirely different paradigms that those we already operate in.
Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.
And I'm 52.
If you insist on waiting for someone else to train you, or for a class to be available, you have a problem. If you can pick up a book and self-train, you don't have a problem.
Bruce Perens.
Have you seen the IOCCC code that looks like an airplane? It's a flight sim. Have you seen the DeCSS Gallery? Also, there's lots of code on the Daily WTF that is as creative as it is terrible.
How about CSS? Am I not coding or not designing when I write that?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Absolutely.
My only wish for you is that we can get public anonymous suicide booths up and running before you have to suffer too much and that they only cost a quarter to use.
That was the punch card generation. I'm the paper punch tape and cload generation.... PR#6 and all that. No more Y2Ks left, sadly.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
We are not alone: I could name friends in the same age group in similar situations and of the same mindset.
We are, however, the minority: most of my fellow contractors are in their twenties and thirties; I am something of a Bohemian oddity at fifty-one, preferring the gypsy contractor's insecure freedom when I might instead have swallowed the obedience pill and taken a degree and a career and earned the big money at the cost of my happiness.
Obviously the opportunities ebb and flow with The Economy, and not everyone has the mind for perpetual self-education ... but all things considered? Age counts, experience matters -- especially for naturally shy introverts (such as myself) who prefer machines to people and might benefit from an extra decade or two upgrading their human relation skills.
Another thought: I find that my concerns on behalf of my client are very different from the concerns of the 20's-30's developers ... they are smart cookies, and better than me in a number of ways, to be sure ... but they tend to focus on code, and not share my interest in issues like documentation, accessibility, technical debt ... the older I get, the more concerned I become about long-term issues.
-kgj
First the Yes bit. To the HR drone that has never stepped outside of their little niche you are a leopard that can never change it's spots so if your chosen career doesn't match your first qualification then you are seen as a liar. Those people will try very hard to stop you and need to be avoided, so you normally can't go through the normal hiring process to get a job. Even going from engineering to IT I hit that wall and it took a while to get around it.
To the No bit, one anecdote, for what it's worth, is an electrical engineer I know who qualified before he saw his first transistor and now mucks about with microprocessors (as a hobby, but even at nearly 80 he still consults at times on electricity distribution to mines). For plenty of other anecdotes take a look at the work on display at any woodworking show and some of the best of it comes from people that only put in a serious effort after 65 and learnt how to master a trade completely different to what they did for a living, and with a lot more tools and materials available at the hobby level than even a few years ago they don't just get to learn one thing and stand still.
Sadly, I must rely upon cheap clients for major portion of my income.
I get my major-money clients through headhunters, which means (a) the headhunter's cut, and (b) the client want a bargain. "Save us money! Good, Fast, and Cheap!"
But of course there is no Free Lunch, you get what you pay for, and turnover is high under this business model ... which means that a relatively solid, presentable guy like me can find work at places where they burn through other contractors.
They burn through contractors for a reason, and sooner or later they let me go, or I quit. But it's good while it lasts, I love what I do, some of the work is quite interesting.
Generous clients? Clients who Get It? Who appreciate the art and science of software, and are willing to pay software guys at least as generously as they pay plumbers? Only small accounts, personal clients, one-on-one relationships pay this well ... and these are few and far between, alas.
For the most, everybody wants a bargain. Which is, I suppose, how the Devil -- who is said to be exceptionally skilled at bargaining -- stays so busy.
-kgj
I should have paid more attention to the summary. If it's just a matter of learning a different specialisation in the field that you are already in just go do it. Even something as different as some techiniques for programming analog computers can be applied to digital computers so just shifting to another programming language is not a matter of throwing out stuff you already know.
The HR drones you encounter in the future can be creatively placated if you set up something in your workplace that uses a different platform, even if it's for a wiki or a workplace football tipping competition. So long as you put in some real effort to actually know what you are doing you can use very trivial exercises to get past HR and take a real job in the chosen skillset.
Closing to 40's I find it more difficult to get excited about all the new hype. As many here have said, I think this is not due to lack of skill or ability to learn. It is more a question of asking myself do I still love to program, design, architect,... whatever? Since the teen years I loved to do it, would stay up until late just for the kicks of doing it. These days it seems more of a chore. I find it more interesting now to have others take care of the low-level details, attend a meeting and discuss the high-level concepts, figure out how to take things beyond the current state of the art, and guide them doing it. The details all just give me a feeling of having seen too much of it and all the things repeating with a slight twist. Not that I want to completely give it up.
So, for me, the question that is asked here already remains. What do you really wish to do?
Of course, just paying the bills can be a highly motivating factor to get you over all the hurdles and just enjoy it enough to do whatever after 4-5pm..
Your information is out of date, according to this BBC article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19622330
Which cheered me up no end, considering that I'm 40 myself.
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Macrovision introduced a Y2K bug into their "flexnet" licence management program in 2008. It turned perpetual licences into ones that expired in 2000, and it was a couple of weeks before the workaround came through. As long as stupid people are around we'll have that problem, along with the stupid leap year issues that crop up each time.
I said nothing about "average life expectancy". :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The question you should be asking yourself is, why the hell AREN'T you retraining? Any developer's skills should constantly be in motion. You've gotten lazy. You're now realizing your skills are becoming crusty, and soon your employers will realize that too, and see the young whippersnapper over there who has great ideas and new buzzwords.
The one thing you have (hopefully) over those younger guys is experience. Experience, in terms of systems design and in terms of problem-solving (both code and people), is a huge plus, and those are portable across whatever language and system is hip. Take your base skillsets, look at where the eyeballs are at right now, and aim a little ahead of that.
If you aren't excited by that prospect, maybe it's time to take a step back and do some self-reflection. Think about the kinds of things that puts a smile on your face, and see how you can combine that with your current skills.
Good luck, and stay positive. Unless you've sent this question on a timer, you're probably not dead yet. This is a plus! Keep a life balance and the bile down and things will turn out alright.
Being 30+, I get similar questions about being too old to be in grad school, etc.
I tell people that the only thing I'm too old for around this age is to train as an Olympic Gymnast!
That being said, if software isn't fun for you, STOP NOW. Software development, more than any other engineering field I know, requires that you love what you do in order to have any chance of success -- the concentration demands are too great otherwise. This, in my opinion, is the main reason older people leave -- they have more interesting things to do.
If you are _willing_ to learn new tech, don't fret anything. Just get in there and figure it out -- pick a project to finish in technology X and finish it. Take a class or work through a book if necessary.
But as an older developer make sure you do the following:
1) Be sure to know WHAT the latest technologies are
2) Be sure to have skills in more than one technology -- I would recommend branching out from MS-Only technologies (for 'street cred,' if nothing else)
(You need the items above to be competitive)
3) Dress and act mature -- and present yourself as having insight into technology integration, team dynamics, and what it takes to complete a project -- this is your edge!
Whether you do management or coding, I believe these things will help.
is when the chick looks to be under 30...
And even then, they think I'm too old before I do...
Be seeing you...
Age isn't the problem. It's just an easy to find excuse.
I know several engineers in their mid to late 50's who completely retrained in the latest mobile development technology (Objective C and iOS or Java and Android or both) and ended up with new jobs or fairly lucrative consulting gigs. It's actually easier for some of the older ones, since they were used to writing code for big complex computers that had a fraction of the memory and were over 100X slower than any recent smartphone, and the kids are already grown and out of the house.
Great comment. Some folks on these forums seem to love re-inventing the *same* problems with different tools. They learn development languages and compare them, citing the well-worn "If all you have is a hammer ...".
For me, I prefer to choose one very general purpose and performant language every half-decade or so. At the moment I'm still getting great mileage out of Java. While I take peeks at other languages for me Java is still fast enough, general purpose enough, comprehensive enough and evolving enough to get stuff done in almost any application domain (I like GWT/vaadin for the Web, JoGL for 3D stuff, and modern Swing for the UI). Now, because I have stabilized on that toolset (which is also cross-platform) that means I then free my mind to work on the important stuff, the application domain.
While there are plenty of jobs that are just shuffling fields between database, memory and screen I'm fortunately enough to get some hard problems too - device control, scientific problems etc. Now rather than try and learn the language-du-jour I've been learning how to solve hard problems (re-using the ever-broadening Java knowledge and toolset I've built up over time). I understand how many hate Java, or consider other languages better for specific purposes, but for me Java is good enough and the benefit of having my mind free to work on hard problems (optimising and implementing linear algebra, calculus, and GLSL shader problems, for example) is worth not following some of these new, short-lived, narrow-utility languages.
So, in this regard. My experience leads me to agree with your statements 100%. In my case, I do have a strongly preferred technology, but that is just because re-using complicated modules I've developed saves me time. I find it is simply not possible to solve hard problems from scratch each time you have a new hard project - that's why I try and stick with a cross-platform, efficient, general purpose technology (even if I'm tempted by niceties in other languages from time to time - but it turns out they are not worth the loss of code reuse, IMHO).
The main reason why this original question is not insightfull is: someone focuses on one platform (.Net) which runs basically only on one OS (windows) which implies: he has no clue about computing even while he is already 40, cough cough.
Or, perhaps he knew what platform his shop was targeting. Perhaps he was given the explicit requirements to use VB.NET and not C# or Java or whatever.
If you had said that he is not well rounded, I would have agreed with you. But the only one who has "no clue" is the one who thinks that everyone should know Assembly, Fortran, Cobol, Smalltalk, C, Pascal, Modula 2, Java, Ruby, Haskell, Ada, PHP, Perl, VHDL, LISP, Scheme, Punch Cards, Lolcode, and then "maybe" he'll be good enough to take a job that targets only one of those languages. Get real.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Hardly. If you're 40, you're looking at about another 20+ years of working. It's time to think about the last *half* of your career, which I suppose you can call the end if you'd like, but you might just as well think of the first 20 years as just getting started.
Really, you need some sort of objective feedback. Numbers and averages are all well and good, but who are *you*. I've known great 50+ year old coders and many, many incompetent 20 year olds, which really isn't surprising. Those 30 intervening years filter out the bad ones. If you're still doing it at 50, you most likely don't suck.
"Am I too old to retrain?" "Am I pretty?" "I think I'm fat. Do you think I'm fat?"
Geez. "No, you're just wonderful. You don't need to retrain. Just be yourself."
It's not like .NET 2.0 is that much different than the current .NET 4 stuff. In fact, .NET 4 is just an add-on. I never understood why people get so freaked out. It's just a library. Google is available. Just get yourself into a project that uses new technology, (or push your current one forward, if possible), and learn by doing.
Heres a question, if .NET is so great, why isnt 99% of the windows GUI and desktop + IE + non speed critical code written all in C# ? Didnt MS abort converting 90% of the OS to .NET ?
Different tools for different projects. C# is not normally used for speed critical stuff, because it's interpreted. IE was written before C# was a thing: rewriting it is not cost effective (at least not yet). Stop being a hater. Seriously, it's just a language. Just a set of libraries. Works the same way as most other C-type languages.
The question "Am I too old to retrain/learn new things?" can be answered with another question: "Are you dead yet?". The answer to that second question is the answer to the first.
Whether you want to learn new things is another question, and equally valid. Myself, I'll keep rolling my eyes at the new kids who didn't bother to learn history and so keep repeating mistakes that were thoroughly hashed out decades ago, but I'll keep learning the new stuff until they push me over into the coffin. Or more likely, given my usual to-do list, I'll tell the morgue attendants to take a number and get in line, I should have time for them in about 3 weeks.
I'm 33. Looking back, there is a distinct disconnect between the way I did things in a world prior to Google, and the way I do things having Google available to me.
I increasingly no longer need to memorize specifics for things, so I find that I simply don't do that much anymore (I used to be very good at it). Instead, I get to grok an fast-increasing number of abstract concepts and Google any details that are missing on an as-needed basis.
I noticed that this trend accelerated rapidly when I replaced my Palm Pilot with a Droid a few of years ago: Having a semi-proper web browser in my pocket at all times changed my life, in that it was no longer necessary (and seldom even useful) to remember details for things that I only need to do occasionally.
I'm very much a generalist at heart, so I find that this usually works quite well for me.
On the other hand, I can easily find myself crippled when I'm in the field and Internet access isn't available to me for some reason or another -- it is as if part of my brain is lobotomized.
But the point is that I don't believe that age has anything to do with this shift in thinking, but just the availability of better tools. I used to memorize details because it helped me work easier (who wants to carry around, let alone use, reference books?), and now I think abstractly because that method has become easier thanks to Google and the other things that my pocket computer does for me.
This all combines to mean that I can grasp concepts far larger than I ever could before without getting bogged down in the details of implementation, but can still implement them very well when/if the time comes (as long as I have teh Intarwebs). In other words, I get more/bigger things done than I used to, with less effort. That's a good thing, but again I think it's more a function of a shift in the available tools than that of my own steadily-increasing age.
Kid-proof tablet..
Why are you in support?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I'm 51, and I'm working for a startup, using java and Spring and couchDb and a little javascript, all new to me, preparing to dive into data mining and analytics, which I've also never done before, and will probably get into iOS and Android at some point. You're NEVER too old. But you may have to make your own opportunities (easy to say, not always easy to do).
Cheers, Tim -- Tim Janke Part mad scientist, part lion tamer: sr. software engineer, global team leader, project mana
I am 40 and i am doing support job from last one year coz its pay me well. before that i was Unix/Linux system admin for 8 years and before that i was in the teaching. For my current job as Tech engineer i have to do lots of learning before actually going to support our customer. I would say age here doesn't matter you can do anything if you are feeling for it. I love linux system administration and still pay with Linux over virtual setups KVM mainly but I was not paying me good so i just switched to support role luckily also involve using my unix/linux skills the product I am supporting is based on BSD :) but prosperity.
I will do this role as far as it pays me well :)
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
Yes, you are too old. Your only option is to go management and since you are not a people person, your only options is to get into a new field.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
Managing people is one of those areas where books can be somewhat helpful, but what I highly recommend is seeking out a mentor. Hopefully you can find one within your organization, but even outside is good too. Find someone who leads/manages in the way you want to and see if they can coach and help you along. If you find a good mentor, they will be able to help you figure out what makes you suck at it and then figure out ways to fix/work-around those issues.
Depending on your company, your HR department may also have manager training programs to help train you in some of the basics of how your company likes its managers to work. That might help, but I think a personal mentor you can take problems to and get personal advice from is invaluable. Plus, this mentor/mentee relationship can help build your networking opportunities. As you try to improve in your current role, your mentor may have visibility to other roles that may suit you better.
It's easy to retrain. Pick a personal project which uses some technology, develop it to completion and you'll be conversant with it by the end. A few months works for me.
If you enjoy learning, then you're never too old.
I'm 40 and I'm learning hardware description language (Verilog) which is about as mindblowingly different to writing C or Java etc. as you can get, but I'm learning it successfully and having a lot of fun doing it.
I also started to learn a foreign language starting at age 36 and I'm now at an advanced level, pushing for fluency soon.
You're never too old to learn, unless you have the defeatist attitude and give up because you think you're too old to learn.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
First thing I did: tried to reject those floating stuff like VB.NET that was in fashion 3 or 4 years, C# (that is changing constantly and you will never be good enough) and in general - reject everything, that has a lifespan shorter than 10 years, so you have the time to master it. In my case, I started looking for another job: python instead of .NET and linux administration/scripting instead of regular developer. I cant imagine in several years being one of those amazing old geeks, staring at Visual Studio or Excel macros. Come on, old geek must be a master of console and all those youngsters around must be astonished and charmed by your skill and magic. You will never beat them in .NET 8.5 RC2 just because it will be completely different than today's .NET
Long story short: Im trying to master the things, that have i.e. books released 7 years ago and they are still valid.
Saying that about programming is like saying that painting is turning a concept into a picture, through obvious and necessary applications of the brush. The *goal* of programming is to turn requirements into code. Programming itself is the creative process of building that code; it's obviously creative, as my code to achieve a goal will be different to your code to achieve a goal (even if we start with the same design and architecture), because we think differently. Design and architecture are also creative, but they're done at a conceptual level. This isn't just my opinion, programming is legally recognized as a creative work, which is why source code has copyright.
You're in the wrong industry if you think you shouldn't be constantly training.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
The ability to learn does not decrease that much over the years. The real problem is to get started. The first weeks hurt. The rest is not a problem if you stay determined. However, modern software development requires much more people skills, as you always work in groups and you have to be able to communicate with people which lack any people skills. So if you have problems in group work, then gettraining courses in that area. The computer programming skills are easily adopted to new frameworks and languages, as they are all more or less the same. They use OOP and work with a set of patterns, like inversion of control, factories, meta-models and aspects. As a CS person, you can adopt all your knowledge easily or you failed to study the subject. If you are a self-trained person, then this will be much harder, as you do not have learned all these concepts and methods, which make it easy to learn and train yourself in a new framework and technology. In that case: Get one. I thought I was a good programmer, when I entered University, but the boost in the first 1/2 year was enourmous. It was like using a candle all these years and now I had an flood light.
It's not to late to learn new stuff and reorientate you profession or change your career.
In may I asked which degree I should go for for a late career boost (article seems to be archived without comments, which is a shame ... maybe you'll have more luck searching for it). The choice was CS or Business Informatics. I was leaning towards business informatics.
There was a bit of negativity in the responses (to late, missed chance, give up, blah-di-blah) but the overwelming majority was very supportive and gave very good advice. I was scared shitless of math (and still am) but started my college run for a BI Bachelor this winter-semester 10 days ago. Also due to the support and advice given here on slashdot. (Thanks again, folks!)
I'm working at the side as a developer, am on the move 13 hrs a day with something of a 70hr week, but it feels great. I'm as focused and determined as I ever was in my life and I'm being pay so low for my senior devwork at my job that no one can push me around. ... In a strange way, it's acutally quite liberating.
I don't know if I will score the solidly paying consultant job I'm now aiming for in 6-7 years (my experience will definitely give me an edge, that's for sure), but I definitely will feel better for myself once I've gotten that degree.
Going (back?) to college might not be an option for you - after all, I'm in Germany and tuition is basically zero, aside from 150€ in fees each semester, but it's never to late to change your life for the better.
Downsize/downshift, move you investments into certs for technologies or products that are currently hip or do you own private low-budget sabatical. Or even change your life entirely! I strongly recommend this guy, his four hour workweek is a fun read and at least good for some inspiration, even if you're not into that sort of literature.
Whatever needs to be done, don't be scared and make your move. I was scared too, but now that I've made my decision I feel very good and even score some envy from my buddies.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
43 and when I started work it was on Vaxen (real ones with washing machine sized disk packs) with Fortran and DCL. And some Coral 66, which no one will have heard of and is as old as it sounds. Some guys had to put up with a very poor text editor on the vax because their dept. wouldn't pay for the CPU cycles for the better text editor.
PCs, with diasywheel printers, were for secretarys, and only in the executive offices. Us engineers had to write up by hand and send it to the typing pool. Seriously.
Later at Uni it was IBM Mainframe and then HPUX boxes, with X and a mouse, and Emacs (18 I think). Modern luxuries then.
PCs were DOS and not useful for real work. [I do not regret never learning 16bit segmented memory programming - I learned about it, that was enough].
Thinking about it, yeah five years later and all that was long gone. MCC or SLS or the new Slackware which actually had a fancy installer, and you were good for real work on a PC.
Dude, you missed out.
C# isn't interpreted ; it's compiled to an intermediate language for a virtual machine, and the VM compiles that to native code on the fly. You can also pre-compile it to native code if you desire, but this forgoes certain runtime optimizations possible with the JIT method.
People had the same criticism of VB6, that it was interpreted - even though it used the same compiler as Visual C++. What got it the reputation for sloth were it's runtime libraries, and it's target audience - it's possible to write slow code in any language. Combine immutable String types with an audience of less skilled programmers and you're going to get some really slow programs. But if you did the same things in C, it would be slow too.
I went back to college and switched careers from real estate to technology at age 40. Go for it!
40 years old is well into middle-age? I would estimate that you must be less than 30 years old then. From my point of view, you are still wet behind the ears. I'm not saying that to be mean, just to give some perspective.
I read once that middle-age is always 10 years older than you are now. I'm not sure that is true forever, especially since now that I'm knocking on 50 its hard to convince myself that middle age is 60 :-)
My calculation for "middle-aged" is certainly different than yours, however. Take your average life expectancy, adjust it however you want to for diet, exercise, family health, etc. I'll take 78, then take a few years off because my Dad died at age 65. So for me, I'll use 72. Subtract 20 years, because the first 20 years of your life don't count as far as I'm concerned. That leave me with 52 years. Divide in half - that 26. Add 26 back to 20 to see the "middle age" of your mature life. So for me, I guess that was 46 (in the rear view mirror now).
Two years ago I quit my high-paying job with a large company, spent 6 months figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and enrolled in a master's program at a major research university. I got a new job, and now I'm on the 4 year master's plan (can't handle school full-time with full-time work and a family with 2 kids age 10 and 12 that I enjoy spending time with).
Being expert in something takes approximately 10 years of continual learning and focused practice. I don't know if I'll have enough time to become "expert" at my new focus of "work", but I'm using my expertise at my old focus to pay the bills while I'm developing my new focus.
The point of all this is that just like being out at night, in the snow and cold, you have to keep moving forward. Whether its developing skills that enable you to do work for which others will pay you so that you can live, or preparing for retirement, or whatever, you have to keep moving forward. If you lay down, you die (I mean this figuratively, but for some people it becomes literally true).
Being worried about "middle age" is a phase that you can alleviate quickly by staying engaged and continuing to move forward. The alternative is giving up, and essentially checking out of life.
Being too old is when you are dead. After-all it is natures way of telling you to slow down :)
Anyone at some stage in their life has to make a decision on what they really want to do, although it is usually best to try, if possible many different jobs prior to deciding . There is nothing wrong with being an excellent programmer however you have to be careful on what languages you want to be skilled in since it is very likely you will have to keep learning languages depending on their popularity. Personally speaking I find this silly since you are always in direct competition with younger people just out of collage or University who are normally up to date with the latest trendy language.
As far as i am concerned it is important in the IT industry to be aware of different languages and the basics of programming but not on specific popular languages since learning a new language is not really that difficult but IMHO boring. What I find the most challenging part of the IT industry is developing people skills such as having the ability to get up in front of CEO's as well as IT specialists and discuss company requirements keeping in mind that if you don't know something admit it but find out asap and get back to the appropriate people or better yet get some of the people in the meeting to assist. This may sound strange to some but a properly managed meeting gets everyone feeling good especially when all questions can be answered and a solution is arrived at and agreed on by everyone concerned.
What I have just described above is some basic consulting skills however as a consultant I don't need to know the latest trendy language or even the most up to date IT products although I do have to be aware however I only need to determine what is the best solution for a customer. It is not necessarily what I want and sometimes not the preconceived wants of the customer. Is this easy? No it is not but it is challenging and a good fit for a person who is in their 30's, 40's, 50's and even into their 60's and older. Of course the pay is so must better than a programmers and you have less chance of burnout, hence the reason why consultants can work until they die if they want too.
Personally speaking I love programming providing I don't get paid for it.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
hehe, I find a lot of those "hammer" folks are the ones who say "you must keep learning", and when I say, "you're going to do some Linux then" their response is "no, I meant learn a different C# framework".
step away from your comfort zone, you never know what gems you'll find.
To be honest, I always hated Java - can't really think why, but maybe it was the whole inefficiency of it (back in the day when a Java GUI with a button and a tree uses up 50Mb RAM.. the days when you only had 256Mb RAM to start with) and possibly the whole "its a new bandwagon" thing that made people think they could just ignore their old problems... in favour of re-creating those problems in a new shiny tech.
So I'm pretty much like you, only a C/C++ arena.
In the C/C++ place, we don;t tend to go for frameworks that "do stuff by magic", we tend to have libraries that solve specific problems. These blocks are then plugged together by the programmer. It may require more thought and understanding of the problem, but at least we can turn these to solve many different problems - compared with the framework approach that solves 1 problem and solves it well, as long as that problem is the one you're trying to solve too.. which it never is.
Still, we're in broad agreement.. now lets find some kids and tell them their music is horrible - not like in our day when a musician could actually play his guitar at ear-deafening loudness and scream lyrics about satan.
unfortunately, I don;t work in a vacuum - I have colleagues, some of whom are younger, some from different backgrounds and some in different departments. Some of them read the marketing hype from certain technology companies and actually believe it!
So quite often we have a company standard to use, and I have to follow it (as I' work well in a team).
I do have a lot of experience with stuff (alas, not so much with fancy websites), as I've done lots of low level, high-level, enterprise and all kinds of stuff. People's lives depend on my old software so I think I can manage the future... if I want to.
I'd think like to be the old man doing C++ in the distant future, away from the continual keeping up with the latest crap, just coming in to work, quietly being effective, probably on the old company systems that bring in the majority of the revenue so the kids can play with the latest TypeScript framework, this year, and whatever comes along next year. At that age, you just don't want the hassle of the changing crap.. at least that's what I'm beginning to find.
Just consider it yourself, when you're 60, do you want to be spending your evenings and weekends reading up on the latest tooling to do the stuff you used to do decades ago? You probably won't.
I worked for many years as an engineer, then I went back and got a PhD, which I finished at 38 years of age. Now I'm an assistant professor at a university. Although I've taken a pay cut (for now), I love this job, because I decide what I want to work on, as long as it leads to tangible results. That doesn't scare me, because I've always been goal-oriented, and the university provides good guidelines and support.
Here's what you have to ask yourself: Why haven't you moved up in the ranks where you already are? I worked for a small company, so there was literally no room for me to be given a management position until after I'd already left, but meanwhile I ended up being one of the major decision-makers, controlled what projects I worked on and was put unofficially in charge of several junior engineers. My engineering and leadership skills were critical in my success in grad school and will be critical in my success as a professional researcher. Do you have skills analogous to this?
The point is, AGE IS NOT A FACTOR. It comes down to your personality, persistence, stress-tolerance, drive, dedication, creativity, and intelligence. That is something that you don't really lose with age, although it does evolve with experience. Just never lose the youthful drive to do the "impossible." As you get older and learn more, the "impossible," which most of the time is really just "impractical," may guide what you do when you have to make locally optimal decisions, but you can see this as opportunity to out-clever those who came before. As long as you see the "impossible" as an annoyance and a hurdle to overcome, then you'll never lose your youthful flexibility. Warp drive is "impossible," but we never stop dreaming about how we might discover how we're wrong about relativity and develop FTL space flight. In my work, I find things all the time that have never been done before because people didn't see it as worth their time, not because they were truly impossible; if you can manage your time and resources properly, you can take advantage of those opportunities.
Just consider it yourself, when you're 60, do you want to be spending your evenings and weekends reading up on the latest tooling to do the stuff you used to do decades ago? You probably won't.
Actually, probably I will. If it gives me the possibility to generate database abstraction layers in a minute instead of writing them myself or to just configure a web service, instead of writing the whole sockets handling and stuff, I think it's worth it.
Privacy is terrorism.
"I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date"
Oh yeah?? I'm 48 and my skill set is so out of date that 'Microsoft dot-net' was just ONE of those little bumps on the road I passed on learning because I was so already behind the times.
I'm so behind the times -- that when you're done with it all you will find no place to park, people like me will have taken all the MIS-handicapped parking spaces. Bring your microsoft-dot-net challenged brain to the field of battle, we'll play bumper cars with our power chairs while our false teeth fall out and the technological world evolves around us. Then we'll get drunk and raise a glass to those poor young people agonizing over amazon.com's new API and whether Google will eat it alive and blow it out the backside. Sorry, I mean back-end.
Fools.
Then we'll go out for steak and cut it into little pieces while we laugh about SQL, how everything was almost totally transactional for so long and they still cannot get it quite right. How RS-232 is dying and nothing out there is robust enough to replace it under the extreme conditions of the real world. How in place of a Real Wire laid by Real Men to solve Real Problems, now everybody's going wireless and clueless and things stop working when granny parks her pickup truck on the curb.
How all the cellphones in the world will some day stop working, all at once, for the same reason -- or just no reason at all.
And they will slap their tiny useless phones and look around at the corroded wire infrastructure that once was the Bell Telephone Network where the rest of the world could break into little pieces and the people in your own home town could still get dial tones and call each other.
When I was 15 years old I was maintaining S-100 computers. This was even before CP/M added the 'userarea' command. Then it all changed. Try PIP-ing from one user area to another without PIP-ping PIP first.
I've spent my whole life in over my head, behind the times, washed out, faking it, using blunt software tools to perform delicate surgery (registry corruption? Boot from linux and delete the whole damned hive)
And you're upset that microsoft-dot-net has passed you by? Take heart my friend, dot-net is just a fart in a high wind. It will not matter in ten thousand years.
Spend time with your children.
Life may not be all you want
but it's all you got
So stick a flower in your belly button
and be happy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Don't quit on programming and it won't quit on you.
Imagine a toolbox of tools. When you are young, you fill it with what you need to get a job done. Over time, your toolbox gets full enough that you can do every task with your current tools so you don't buy more. Ten years later, all your tools start dying at the same time and you have a huge cost to replace them all.
.NET 2.0, you put a lot of .NET 2.0 tools in your toolbox. You probably didn't take time to add the .NET 3 tools to your toolbox or the .NET 4 tools in your toolbox (WPF, WCF, LINQ, XML Serialization, etc.). Now .NET 4.5 is coming out and you need to update your entire toolbox.
.NET Developer, go with this:
When you learn
All I can say, is you have caching up to do. The problem isn't that you are too old to learn, it is that you have such a lot to learn it seems overwhelming. When you were young, you didn't know everything you needed to learn, so you didn't have that overwhelming feeling. You couldn't see the hill you were climbing. Now you are older and you understand what you don't know. Now you see the hill you are climbing. It isn't any bigger, in fact it is likely smaller, but you can see it so it is daunting.
You need to take two hours a week to learn as part of your job. If you do this your toolbox will fill back up with new tools and you will never find yourself in this situation again. Don't worry about your company losing those two hours to your education, they will gain so much more. You will be more productive and something that would have taken two days, takes you a few hours. For example, my previous company I joined a team that had spent over a month working on custom code to build an XML file only to find it didn't work with WPF and binding. I learned XML Serialization and recreated their entire code in eight hours (code that took them a month). I didn't do anything impressive. I didn't write the XML serialization technology, MS did. My code involved simple classes that any new college grad could have done. I just added a new tool (XML serialization) to my toolbox. If they had added XML Serialization to their toolbox and used it, they wouldn't have wasted a month on code that didn't integrate. So you see, your two hours of self study a week will pay off big for your company and is a wise investment.
What should you do to start? Well, since you are a
Learn WPF and LINQ: http://windowsclient.net/learn/
Writing Solaris Device Drivers in Java:
http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/2006/abstract-156.html
I was shocked when I read the original post. I suppose I've lived a very different career, and thus can't really relate to her/his position. I've never been an engineer solely working within environment X, and never got onto a support track. Started out learning Pascal in school, Fortran at work. When I needed to begin to learn 'C', I picked up the K&R, later bolstered with class time. Started my experience with MATLAB by vectorizing someone's Fortran-like m-code. Took several on-line classes to get going on PL/SQL. Java class using a Sun curriculum. I just completed a C++ refresher. On and on.
Unless 'Talcyon' is sick of the thought at getting back into development, then the answer is yes, you retrain and get back up to speed. If you're looking for a kick in the okole to get it back in gear, consider yourself motivated.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Sorry that is a missconception. There is a difference between mere programming or developing software.
Fokllowing your arguing most of Michel Angelos paintings where not done by himself but under his super visioon by his students.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well his post might be missleading. .Net, which implies windows. ...
But he is 45, only knows C#/Visual Basic and
Sorry, in my book he is not even a programmer or a developer
Someone who does not know how real computers work or real programming languages is no one I'm interested in.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Using your own words from comment 41563505 above, I don't see how you can make that argument. You can get by without any creativity and create functional programs. But problem solving often requires some creativity.
I take a look at the development of languages, from C where you can accomplish the same thing in hundreds of different ways due to the raw pointer and things like unions. Someone creates a new language trying to make the language match a particular domain problem, and it becomes all the rage.
OOP brought with it a huge playground in which you could work yourself into an inherited hole, or cleanly re-use code from a base class. Skipping straight to MVC, all of the good ideas around Rails and Spring were essentially "solved problems" which became formalized in the framework. Using C# under MVC implements those "solved problems" in ways which were not clear, or often not even possible, in .NET, without creative workarounds.
Here is the introduction to my programming style: Expressive Programming, which I define as "expressing your intentions so the code is clear." No obfuscation in clever re-use of generic code, unless it is clearly generic and can be clearly expressed. No hiding behind "magic" constructors or members that go off into the database. And the point is, choosing the right solution when a handful would meet the same requirement, requires creativity.
As I said, you can brute-force that by learning every design pattern and debating each one, and then through experience it becomes more clear which is the best path to take. It becomes intuitive, and eventually it just "feels right". If you decide that your domain has a single design pattern which fits the product, and slavishly follow that pattern even though it might not make sense, you are coding without creativity. And your code will most likely have an unmaintainable steaming pile which is inherently change-resistant.
Fixing a bug to adding a small feature inside an existing codebase can be free of creativity, which is why OP fears going the maintenance route. It's boring, and going through someone else's code which you may not even fully understand is not fun. It can also be very creative, where you find the most Goldbergian workaround to avoid changing critical infrastructure and reduce the amount of testing that needs done.
To find a proper balance is an art.
OP also talks about "training". Training is where you read a book or attend a lecture and do exactly what it says. Learning is when you take the same information and apply it judiciously. You can certainly implement a flowchart to decide when and how to break out of the mold. But a person who is a creative problem solver instead of an algorithmic one may come up with the novel approach which soon becomes a de-facto standard such as MVC, Or variations such as MVVM.
OP can be "trained" to do the same repetitive thing in things like circuit design or physics simulations, which is valid. Or OP could learn, generalize, and apply that information to new scenarios in the form of continuous training.
As much as we know about creativity, it could very well be defined as the nature of having been exposed to enough variations that a problem can be solved intuitively, without going through the intermediate steps of evaluation. But there is more evidence that creativity is simply a different way of thinking entirely. The fine line between creativity and insanity, where insanity can be very roughly approximated as "not thinking about things the way most people do."
Punchcards are no longer used (or usefull).
Point was: you know more languages than the poster.
Point is: there is more than windows and a PC.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I quit a good paying job as an instrument tech and went to college full time at age 47 and graduated with a Bachelors in CS with minors in both Math and Art age 50. (4 year degree in 3) I was even picked up on a graduate assistantship to work on my masters in CS. At 50 I was older than many of my instructors, but I certainly was not the oldest student at the university. That was when jobs were scarce (not as bad as at the present) quite a few years ago and I had companies calling me. I was the mythical fresh college graduate with over 26 years of experience. I didn't even have to start at entry level in the new field and I seriously doubt I'm any different than any other technically oriented person that has kept an active mind. I worked my way up to project manager for my last 3 years before retirement. Looking at it from a practical point, if you've kept an active mind, rather than just working 8 hours, going home, kicking your feet up, having a beer, and forgetting about work or learning, most people would, or should have little trouble learning new skills, of expanding on old ones. Your degree or job status already puts you well ahead of the average person in learning ability. There are things that can or may interfere though such as health issues, medications, and even lifestyle. Having kept an active mind is probably the most important part. Although age can play a part, keeping that active mind will normally stave off those old tales about learning becoming difficult. 40 or 50 definitely should not be a problem, but everyone ages differently and contrary to "all men are created equal" they certainly aren't. As the old saying goes, any one who believes that has never been in a public shower! Likewise, mental capabilities vary widely as well. They may peak for the average person in their 20's, but the average person does not work in a job that requires constant learning and adapting. The average person doesn't even have the capability of learning the math required in CS or Engineering. Many make it past 60 while still learning and every once in a while I see articles about someone in their 80's earning a degree. Likely it was in the liberal arts and not sciences, but they were still learning. So it's not some specific age, but mental capacity that eventually slows our learning and it is different for everyone.
I concluded that there are four paths for a tech guy/woman getting older. (1) management; (2) guru, futurist, visionary, author, entrepreneur, personality (e.g., Tim O'reilly, Bruce Schneier, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak); (3) tech warrior/veteran type who stays current, keeps up with changing technologies, etc.; (4) casualty, put out to pasture, laid off, demoted, or at best disrespected and undervalued by management and young hotshots. My own experience was that I tried management and didn't have the magic and couldn't stand the boredom and pointlessness of the politics. I know I'm not enough of an extrovert to be #2. And I realized that #4 is the default path, the path I was on by doing nothing about my rusty skills. I work at a large dot edu, so I've seen old IT guys kept around in a series of less and less skilled jobs till they're doing things like ordering laptops and toner cartridges, getting keys made, replacing projector bulbs, and updating disaster recovery procedure documents. So I reluctantly chose #3. I've paid for some of my own retraining, traveled to a couple conventions (one was on my own dime), set up a blog, twitter account, and got active on stackexchange. I'm making sure that my boss, colleagues, and anyone else, sees all of this. I got a small but unexpected raise recently, and I'm sure this is why. But the most important and unexpected outcome is that I no longer feel as vulnerable to a layoff. It is a lot of work, and I've missed out on a lot of great TV and chillout time. But I'm less miserable at work and I know that I've got a good chance in the job market if the axe falls. Good luck to you.
--tcpiplab
Not old. Go and retrain, or not. Your question is procrastination at its worst, how the hell would anyone else but you know whether you should retrain or not? Really!?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Don't worry if you failed at Management. You couldn't program very well the first time you sat down at a terminal either.
Management takes a different skill set. That's all.
Take a Dale Carnegie Course, read up on basic accounting, and read a book on business management. But, most of all, look at the people you are to supervise, and ask yourself if you can help them.
Toastmasters will also help you. Look for a club.
Managers have to report regularly. Managers also need to keep tabs on what the people below them are doing. Keeping tabs means that they have to have at least a low level ability to do what the people who report to them are doing. So, look for instructional materials on the technologies and systems that your area is using. Failing a few times, with a few people is just part of the learning process.
So, don't be afraid to fail, but Do look for reasons why the failure occurred and avoid that next time.
Also, remember that a good manager helps train the people under him. If you can't help them grow, or if you have not got someone who can replace you, at least partially, then you are not doing your job.
If YOUR Boss isn't willing to help you with these things, then, you are in a sacrificial position.
So, good luck with it all.
But remember, Technology is a rapidly changing field. Whatever you are doing now, it will be obsolete within five years. If you are tired of learning new stuff, then it's time to get a sales job. If you do find excitement in learning new things, then keep at what you are doing now.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Do you still have a pulse? If so, then it's not too late to retrain.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
"back in school to pick up more programming languages" - really? I can see going back to school to learn computer science-type things that are more difficult to learn on your own (or to get the paper that says you've jumped through the hoops so your resume passes the HR filter), but I find it hard to fathom going back to school to learn programming languages (as opposed to more abstract concepts) when it's so easy to install them locally and learn from a decent tutorial. Help me out here. What sort of school, what programming languages? A couple college courses to get up to speed on .NET?
I've been doing this for over thirty years. I started programming in Basic and Assembler and have a long list of technologies that I used to do. They've all gone off the boards and I'm still always picking up new skills. When you stop learning, you're done.
Someone asked the 87 year old Da Vinci how long it took him to accumulate his vast knowledge. He replied, "I'm still learning."
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I am 37 years old... spent 31 years programming as a hobby or for a living. I got tired of coding for a living and became a Cisco instructor. In 6 months I've gotten 3 CCNPs, 5 CCNA, a CCENT, multiple specialist certs, juniper certs etc... I'll take my CCIE R&S lab exam in January.
I've studied 3-11 hours a day minimum every single day since I quit my job in February. I've also been a father of two young kids full time and taught classes most of the time.
Back when I was 18 I could stay awake and alert for nearly 48 hour at a time... now I make use of Red Bull, chain smoke and drink coffee by the liter. But I'll be damned if anyone will tell me I can't keep up with the 22 year olds or learn as quickly as them.
So... what the hell are you whining about... you recognized the problem... get off your ass and fix it.
I'm 44. I develop web-based intranet apps for a Fortune 500 corp.
My job involves lots of coding in Java, with occasional excursions into SQL and RPG. Lots of HTML and CSS, as well. We make heavy use of Hibernate, which reduces the amount of actual SQL we have to touch.
I despise Java. The core language is very weak, so you have to have significant numbers of external libraries added in to accomplish anything. This results in a very large, complex API which no one can hope to learn the ins-and-outs of. You actually need something like Eclipse or NetBeans, where the editor can look at what you've entered and suggest methods, based on context. It really doesn't help when you tell the system you need a "List" of something, and it needs help figuring out which of the "List" classes to use.
Prior to this gig, I've coded largely with vim (no, I'm not trying to start a vi - emacs flamewar). I used the word completion functions but, otherwise, the code flowed from my fingers into the editor with relatively little input from the editor. Once I got "in the zone," I could code for hours at a time and accomplish a great deal. These Java-based editors need you to stop while it thinks about what to propose, which breaks the flow. I never, ever, get "in the zone" with Eclipse. And, due to the breadth of the libraries and the different classes and methods, I've never been able to code Java, effectively, with vim.
Add in the fact that everyone wants to tie in all these frameworks which abstract stuff away, many of which are built on "convention over configuration." This results in a lot of programmers who are little more than technological "sorcerer's apprentices," copying-and-pasting stuff from one project to the next because, well, that worked in the last project and they really have no clue HOW it works; this project needs to do something similar so, hopefully, it will work in this one, too.
On a recent project, I requested assistance from the most experienced Hibernate guy in the place. Something I was trying to do wasn't working. After digging around in it for a half hour, he told me I'd just have to dig into the documentation and figure it out because he had no clue why it wasn't behaving. Oh, and when I figured it, let him know what finally worked. The most experienced Hibernate guy was, in the end, just another "sorcerer's apprentice," who didn't really comprehend the "magic" he was wielding.
I'm not happy with being a "sorcerer's apprentice," but I don't have time to dig through the piles and piles of code which constitute the multiple layers of stuff we're building on. Expecially when you consider the fact that each of the layers are evolving, and we may replace the library in this layer with a completely different one in six months.
I don't have any kind words for RPG, either. It's a legacy language which predates widespread use of SQL. Some of the code I'm dealing with has been in production for two decades, back when the company was all green-screen apps and no intranet. The beancounters who run corporations don't want you ripping out piles of old stuff and replacing it; that old stuff has been in use for years, has been thoroughly tested and debugged. Who cares if it's hard to read and maintain? Who cares if the original developer, the only person who ever knew how it worked, retired years ago? It works! Modify it if you absolutely must, but don't replace it. Oh, and expect a s**tstorm if your modifications end up breaking something.
A year ago, I was wondering if I was getting too old for programming work. I loathed my job. Why do I put up with that place? Because there are precious few options in this town, I'm not in a position to relocate, I still need an income and that pays better than most jobs in this area. So, I put my head down and kept plowing along. Wondering how hard it would be to get a prescription for anti-depressants.
About six months ago, I started retraining myself. I started reading books about de
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
I passed the half-century mark a few years ago, and been doing "maintenance" on an evolving system. When I started my career 30 years ago I was a developer who worked on all the phases from requirements to delivery on over a dozen radically different systems (satellite download analysis, AI, document management, network diagnostics), but I burned out pretty severely by about 35.
What I've discovered is that I am now more interested in finding and solving the problems than I am in creating "new" systems that are basically re-hashes of the "new" systems from decades past. The languages and OS's change, but the requirements seldom do.
But, since users are even more creative in breaking systems than developers are in designing and building them, it's important to be able to find out where the developer missed something, or why the user decided to not follow the business rules they swore to the requirements team they always follow.
The project I'm on has a "new development" team which is tasked with implementing the fixes my team recommends, and which develops new functionality that the end-user requires. I've been able to make it clear to upper management that Operations and Maintenance is just as much a stake-holder in the design of a system as the end-user, and in fact have requirements that are just as important.
Case in point: An early version of the system (web-based app) would crash, with a "500" error and Java stack trace which was displayed to the user. This was very handy for us in O&M as it allowed the user to send us useful information about the state of the server. Unfortunately, someone in Architecture felt that the user would be confused or unable to continue working if they saw this "horrible" report. So, they decided to replace the "500" pages with a generic "An error has occurred. Contact the help desk if it continues".
Unfortunately, there is no message that the user could pass on to us via trouble ticket, we are now left to try to figure out where the error occurred, what the error was, and what the user did to create it. Even more unfortunately, the developers never bothered to log the exception stack anywhere, and so we're stuck with the equivalent of the old joke, "Doctor it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" and trying to figure out what's going on by intuition and experience.
It was hilarious once the development team had to try to support the system during a major deployment, and they discovered just what we "mere maintenance" people go through every day. Needless to say, they were not happy with actually *using* the code they had written and trying to track down what caused the problems the users found. I think they understand now that reporting an error is more than just saying "an error occurred", and so they're going to start reporting somewhat more specific errors, at least something the user can copy/paste into a trouble ticket.
So, TL;DR, maintenance is more like enjoying solving a mystery or following a forensic post-mortem than creating a painting or writing a song, but it is creative, just in different ways, and doesn't have to be the "dead end" that young developers see it as.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
No, my argument would be that those students made a creative contribution to the piece. It's not some sort of zero sum game, it doesn't make Michelangelo's contribution any less creative. Just because other parts of developing software take creativity, it doesn't mean that programming does not.
I was more arguing that there is creative programming which is called developing, and on the other hand uncreative repetitive programming that is not creative ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What you describe is for me a developer, not a programer, albeit the terms might be in our times no longer that distinct.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I keep seeing this suggestion. Is it possible in the US to gain contract work without experience, or is it just wishful thinking & special snowflakes spouting off?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your question is vague and dependent on many circumstantial details. Generally, I don't see it possible to gain contract work without experience.
But the OP says he has years of VB/.NET coding experience. Then it boils down to what region of the country, what industries the programming work came from, what is his competence in what he is being asked to do, and how good are his professional networking skills.
You generally do not land "entry level" contract work from job websites from headhunters and HR departments. They will often ask for 5 years of experience in X, when the language didn't exist 5 years ago. (That's because they don't know how to properly do their job.)
But when trying to shove a foot in the door, you will get wind of a possible short-term work from old bosses, former coworkers, and headhunters (not through classifieds). The people who hire will be the (senior) project managers who only give a rats ass about getting a task completed. If you can sell *them*, and placate their HR, that's how you get contract work. But its not enough to make a living on without a previous programming jobs, and you can't be demanding the "going rate" until you develop a reputation as someone who delivers.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon