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Ask Slashdot: Finding Work Over 60?
First time accepted submitter Hatfield56 writes "I've been in IT since the mid-1980s, mainly working for financial institutions. After 16 years at a company, as a programmer (Java, C#, PL/SQL, some Unix scripting) and technical lead, my job was outsourced. That was in 2009 when the job market was basically dead. After many false starts, here I am 3 years later wondering what to do. I'm sure if I were 40 I'd be working already but over 60 you might as well be dead. SO, I'm wondering about A+. Does anyone think that this will make me more employable? Or should I being a greeter at Walmart?"
Definitely get into asbestos removal. Asbestosis won't hit for 30 years.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Rather than applying for a full-time position, have you considered forming your own independent consulting business? You would have to leverage your contacts in the industry, but there is a massive difference in the culture between hiring a 60-year-old technical lead and hiring a 60-year-old's consulting business. Vendor management contacts just won't care, in my opinion, if you're professional and can get results.
I feel for you. I was laid off 6 years ago at 50 and I finally got a state IT tech job for way, waaaaayyyyyy less money.
I have almost built back up to where I was 7 years sgo but it was tough.
A+ or any of the other minor certs will not make much difference in your job marketability.
Having taken the A+, Network+ and Security+ as a requirement for my current job, I can tell you that they're not worth a damn thing. The tests are simple and they just check basic knowledge that you probably already have as a programmer. You could always go the route a lot of fresh grads who are also not working do: start writing apps. Games are fun, easy and profitable enough if done well. Plus there's a slew of tools to make them quickly produceable. Lately I've been playing with the AppGameKit (AGK) from the Game Creators, and I like it. They have a free version that you could try out and see if it's something you'd be interested in.
Can you survive a clearance check?
If so, you should have no problem getting on with a company doing DoD contracting....they OFTEN look for years of experience. If you're good, have a decent resume, they will submit you in....they want you to get the jobs so they can get $$ off you.
The market is often dying to hire people with lots of resume experience.
You definitely have a leg up on younger programmers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you spent that much time in financial institutions, the think about Urbana, Maryland. Banner Life has a data center there, as well as Fannie Mae, and the Social Security Administration is moving a data center there. It's pretty good bucks, but far enough outside the DC metro area to be at least reasonable. Just an idea.
Try to get some work on the several freelance boards over the internet, start with small jobs and build a reputation. Try to master one specific subject, dont go jack of all trades.
IMHO certifications mean little once a person has >10 years of experience
Leverage your experience for some contracting jobs.
Since you worked in a high reliability/availability environment before, target similar areas like telecom, military, avionics, medical equipment.
Also don't forget those industries also require competent Verification and Validation staff on contract. It may be a "step down" in a lot of peoples' opinions, but a job is a job, and it actually is really hard to find V&V people that have programming skills.
IT skills is a dime a dozen. You need to sell yourself in IT in your particular skillset. Health Care, Manufacturing, Legal, Finance, Government... People don't want experienced IT workers. They want IT workers with experience with their business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Perfect position for trying out various "Hello world" options
I have to ask what your expectations are and be realistic.
As an employer actively recruiting IT staff at the moment, rare in the current job market I know, and I have a choice between a recent uni-graduate and someone with 15 yrs experience who I can hire for almost the same wages because so many skilled IT staff have been laid off and need to pay their mortgage. For me the choice is obvious, I don't care about the age factor.
However I also interview many many people who think they deserve to get the same remuneration they got from their high-flying finance job and wonder why they are still jobless after two years.
If you get your A+ then you will work at Best Buy for the geek Squad... And from What I have seen there, walmart greeter is a better job.
With your experience why in the world would you even look at the gutter that is the world of A+? with your background in programming there is a lot of freelance stuff you could do. hell start trolling the freelancing boards and pick up jobs you can do from home. Although a lot of those are incredibly low pay. I know of several flash designers with 15 years experience that refuse to look at the freelancer boards...
"wanted an entire website designed in flash with a SQL backend and capable of scalability. Expectedt o take 3-6 months. Willing to pay $250.00 total for the project."
That kind of crap is rampant on the freelancing sites.
Or find a small business that needs a senior programmer. You know more than the 20 somethings, so use your age and experience as a positive!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have you considered obtaining a teaching "certificate" (not necessarily a teaching degree) and teaching kids how to code? Consult your local school system to see if your skills and experience can be used. If they don't have a programming course - offer to create one.
I don't know about that. I think they are outsourcing in my area. When I pull into the parking lot, there's always a homeless person with a sign welcoming me and asking for donations :\
If you can program Java really well then you are 90% there for android app writing, Make your living $0.99 at a time. There is a dearth of real business apps for Android.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And this, kids, is precisely why you need to plan aggressively for retirement.
(To the original poster, I don't really have any suggestions, but you're making an important point -- work hard, save hard, and "what can I do to find work" when you're 60 isn't a question you'll need to worry about...)
I would recommend (not knowing if you already do this) becoming active with open source projects. I don't necessarily mean become an Apache commiter, but participate in projects in a minor way (bug testing, mailing lists, forums) , create some of your own pet projects however small they may be and share them on github/bitbucket, answer questions on Stack Overflow/Server Fault, etc. That way you establish an online portfolio of who and what you do.
I often refer to people's online presence as a differentiator when I evaluate CVs and interviews. Someone with an active Github account would indicate someone willing to learn and share and would fit in very well in my team. Someone unknown online, would raise a few question marks, and with enough alternative CVs...
My other Sig is very funny.
I think the question of whether you want to work for the money or you want to work for having a day-time occupation is important.
If you are in for the money, I am sure there are plenty of opportunities in the consulting/freelance side that you can follow.
If you are in for the occupation, there are plenty of places where you can do something interesting in an open source project, in an association or in a university. Universities are full of interesting software project that never get maintained or made production ready because a full time skilled engineer is too expensive. I am sure you can get some money out of it and work on fun problems.
A+ is useless except for getting past those clueless 25 year old HR drones.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
I agree. What have you been doing the last 3 years? Hopefully building some useful software for someone..
A 62-year old friend of mine took an iOS certification course at the University of Washington (Seattle) and promptly found a full-time position at one of the Big Four professional services firms, developing mobile applications for their clients. Prior to this job, he was a self-employed specialty developer, until his wife fell ill and he needed to procure full-time employment.
So hope springs eternal - it's at least possible to get a job after being Of A Certain Age, if you have the right skills for the right field.
nebulo
Make sure your skills are up-to-date, and structure your resume in such a way as to not reveal how old you really are. For example, no dates on your education and/or military service, leave off early jobs, etc. You might want to dye your hair if you're gray, although I wouldn't go that far.
It's illegal to not hire you due to your age, but of course it's hard to win an age discrimination suit. So don't let it go there.
Other people have mentioned govt. contracting. Some contracting firms like to hire older techies because they fit in well with the aging population of government workers.
No sig? Sigh...
The problem you're going to experience is that; unless the headhunter knows you're brilliant with tons of experience and willing to do the job for the same pay as some wet-behind-the-ears kid who'll never cut the mustard, when you get to HR, the clueless twit who works there will look at you and show you the door because you're 60.
Start making Android or iPhone apps. Make a name for yourself by consulting; get yourself going with a IT temp shop. Having A+ is like having a driver's license, it's not a path to anything.
If you were with the financial industry and really understand the ins and outs of that, you should be able to get a job in the investment banking sector, as HFT is always looking for guys who are good, and don't make mistakes -- because as we've seen, mistakes can cost millions or even billions in HFT -- so they want really good people, not cheap people who will ultimately cost them even more.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Have you looked into consulting? Presumably, you have a rather large amount of industry experience and breadth of knowledge.
Being a PM, working with companies on IT initiatives, that kind of thing?
After I 'graduated' from my last programming job, I've been in consulting and not writing code. I've actually found it quite rewarding, and companies are looking for people with "big picture" kinds of skillsets and not just people who can work on the technical nuts and bolts.
All of those soft-skills you've likely picked up, like being able to work in meetings, work to build consensus, scheduling and planning, estimating, overseeing .. these are all skillsets people will still be willing to pay for.
There is life after code, and I definitely know people in their 50's and 60's who are still consultants and in demand.
For some tasks, a little age and perspective is actually what is most needed -- it's like the old joke about the young bull wanting to run down and fuck one of the cows, and the old bull wanting to walk down and fuck them all. The stuff you've already done can be really valuable in helping organizations do new things. Sometimes, just having been there and done that gives you the perspective to see similarities in what's going on and understand where to go from there.
But organizations probably aren't looking to hire you as a coder, but as someone who works at a slightly higher level. (And I'm not saying give up on your tech skills, just recognize the your experience might be more valuable than your ability to write code. If you can still wow the young punks with some coding wizardry, all the better.)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The problem you face is one that I faced long ago in a completely different vein. I was unemployable, because although I had developed programming skills, they were self-taught by reading books and websites rather than school. Without significant experience, I was unemployable as all the jobs had requirements like Bachelor's requirements.
So I did what seemed to be the only thing left - started my own company! I chatted it up with anybody I could find who ran a business and needed something done, found some people willing to pay for a solution, and worked long hours for a while until my revenue stream was sufficient to live on. Now 15 years later, I have ownership of a valuable company that has grown successfully every single year since starting, employees working a job they like with decent pay and a work environment set up the way I like it. Sure, it has its stresses, but they are stresses I choose to assume or ignore, and I like the control that offers me.
It's not for everyone, but I will probably never have a "job" ever again.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
But when I interview I look for a few things: technical merit, reliable, personality, enthusiasm.
It doesn't even cross my mind that an older candidate wouldn't be qualified. Often, I expect them to have a mountain of experience that could get absorbed into the company. What I've run into though is the older folks often don't have that "nerd enthusiasm", haven't kept their skills current, or are just stuffy with no sense of humor. Maybe it's a generational thing? But a young person with the same ailments wouldn't have a shot here either.
A+ means absolutely nothing. I took my A+ certification out of high school, got something like 99.9% on it with ever actually studying. The only real suggestion I have is to get it so you can take the second level certification test, MSCE, Linux+ etc.... Just load up with papers and then if nothing else you'll get hired to look good for the company. All of those certifications with the exception of CCNA, CCNP, CCIE and MSCE are all just laughable papers. They basically mean you found the power button and plugged the computer in. If your going to focus your time into a real certification CCNA is a good one which is a HARD path or your MSCE. Of course any of the computer networking certifications will at least help.
- Certifications. Cross A+ off that list, and give a look at brainbench and some others. Most certs are not worth anything, but with your experience, you should be able to pull off quite a few of them at 'Master' level, which will demonstrate skills empirically. If those skills are in line with your experience, they will act as a "force multiplier" for that experience.
- Experience. Did I mention this already? If you have kept current, this goes a looooooooong ways.
- Stability. 16 years is a long time at one company, especially by the standards of the last decade or so. I started my IT career in the mid 90s and since then I have only had two jobs for longer than a year. It's similar for many people in the field. No hiring manager likes it, but they live with it.
- Age discrimination...? They aren't even allowed to *ask* you how old you are, so don't give them many hints. If the experience/history on your resume goes back to the 1970s, scrub out the oldest stuff. Drop the years off your education, if you have it listed. Impress them with what you know to get you the interview before you drop any hints that may bias them.
The toughest thing you have going against you is that every potential employer is going to be worried that they will spend time training you and bringing you up to speed on their systems and procedures just in time for you to retire when you were about to start really making (instead of costing) them money. It's not your age itself that is the problem, it's the fact that you will probably be retiring sooner than they would like. This means a lot of time and resources will be invested in you that they won't recoup when it comes to training "the next generation" of replacements and so on.
You can mitigate a lot of that by sticking to your niche, even if that means moving where the work is. It'll be a lot easier for you to stick to the financial industry, where experience not directly skill related makes you more valuable. Of course you need to double-down on your pre-interview research too. Make sure that you tailor every resume you send out to the specific employer you are going to send it to, highlight the skills and experience that relate directly to their business.
A+ is one the most useless certifications out there. Can you plug in a mouse? Then your A+ certified!
Quoth the un-certified. Some certifications are good for some things, but no certification is good for all things. A+ has it's place, and it's quite a bit more then certified mouse installer. An A+ certificate and knowing how to use Google should be enough to get you an interview for the help desk. Depending on the company, that can be better then Wal-Mart greeter, and (again, depending on the company) the options for growth can be much better.
Are you willing to move somewhere new? If not, consulting is the best route to go.
Do you have your heart set on continuing to program? You mention PL/SQL - PostgreSQL experts are in great demand now and are replacing oracle jobs all over the place. Few people have a LOT of experience, so being able to just claim that you've installed it locally (hint: install it locally on a unix server), and being able to do PL/SQL, you have a good chance of getting SOMETHING in that field.
Do you plan on working more of a "corporate" job - aka: Big company to move up in? In that sense, i can see why your age would be a problem. Instead, take up android development. If you can get ANYTHING published, you will be in extremely high demand all over the country for java based android developers. You would also have a much higher chance of being able to telecommute or work from home full time. Either way, having long time java skills will still give you a shoe in to many android shops.
Final recommendation - if you want to continue writing code and can't find anything, I would recommend taking up javascript and HTML. You can always work from home, PHP/Python/Ruby are pretty easy to learn, BUT you can keep using c# and java as well. There are a LOT of web jobs available all over.
As for a+ / network+ ... both are pretty useless in my opinion. Security+ i've seen a few people give a nod of acknowledgement, but that's pretty much it.
As for WHERE to get jobs: www.dice.com and www.craigslist.com are my two recommendations for finding something. Otherwise register yourself with a tech recruiter like teksystems or accenture. They make money by finding you jobs, AND they will sometimes bypass the interview portion with the official company they are trying to place you in, or they might only do phone interviews - that should help keep your age a little more hush hush while going through the interview portion.
If you haven't noticed, programming has changed since the '90s. It's now pretty well a blue-collar job -- under three levels of management. Even in small companies, it's heavily controlled, especially where version control comes into play.
It's the perfect job for any 20-something.
By the time 30 roles around, you'd better be the one determining what gets programmed. Whether or not you also do the programming is irrelevant.
By 60, your value comes as proper experience. You shouldn't be looking for a programming job. You should be looking to manage a programming company, consult for a programming company, assess a programming company, or start your own programming company. Otherwise, you're a) not bringing any more skill than a 20-something and b) wasting a lot of the skill that you certainly have.
I'm 35, have my own software company that's varied in size between 1 and 5 programmers -- including myself. And that's just the way I love it.
At least in the California job market, there is a dearth of qualified applicants. I've been on both sides of the hiring equation for years. The idea that you can't get a job, with over a decade of PL/SQL, Java and other programming, is just laughable, and tells me we must be missing something, here.
Are you missing all your teeth and refuse to get dentures? Are you only looking for jobs in a 10 mile radius of your house? Are you demanding an astronomical salary? Do you have obvious medical problems that make you incredibly unreliable from day-to-day? Are you just a mediocre programmer?
Your age certainly isn't preventing you from landing a new job. That said, it's certainly possible whatever those issues are, they could be age-related or age-compounded.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's much easier to find a tech job with a government agency (local, state, or federal) than it is to find a job in industry. Government jobs are publicly posted, and governments are especially sensitive to various laws regarding equal employment opportunity; there's also a higher percentage of older employees in governments than you will find in most companies. There's something positive to be said for a steady 40-hour/week job. While I don't think much of certifications, some government job postings include them, in which case it would be worth pursuing that certification for a specific position.
If you enjoy teaching, you should consider finding a way to teach at the college level. Community colleges and university extension programs often need instructors, and there are numerous for-profit institutions that don't require advanced degrees of their faculty. While teaching itself can be personally rewarding (not so much financially, though), many of your students will be working for companies that might be willing to hire you as a contractor or perhaps even as an instructor for the company's internal education programs.
In summary, be realistic about what you can bring to the party, recognize that many companies simply find legal ways not to hire people over 40, and focus on those opportunities where you are on a relatively even playing field in seeking a job. Good luck.
Quoth the un-certified.
Then hear it from a certified person. I have A+, Network+, Server+, MCSE, CCNP, CCSP, CCDP, CCSE, and about 20 others. I'm a contractor, and for the State of Alaska, to touch a desktop (even to plug in a mouse) as a contractor, you must have A+. To touch a switch (even if just to move it in a rack while it's powered off) you must have Network+. To change tapes in a backup server, you must have Server+. I got those as a condition of employment for a consulting firm. I took 3 tests in 3 days, no studying, passed all three first try.
They are worthless, and I literally got A+ so I'd be "qualified" to plug in a mouse.
Learn to love Alaska
I know of at least two companies who have gone looking for people who are either retired or semi-retired for full-time positions. The companies aren't rich, and so can only pay normal wages, and so get turned down a lot and/or have terrible turnover as people in mid-career go looking for more money elsewhere.
They find that older engineers more reliable, and that their depth of experience makes them as effective as more junior people, even where the juniors try to work too many hours. Sometimes because the juniors are working too many hours (:-))
It's hard to find semi-retired people, though. The people I know about were found by the employer via word of mouth, but I suspect one can ask for 'enough experience that age and treachery beat youth and enthusiasm' in an ad without actually getting arrested...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
This clearly delineates the dichotomy that aging developers reach at some point. (I'm not even close to 50 yet, let alone 60, but I'm not 25 any more either...)
When you're young, and not really at the top of your game, you can still fill a role. Some kinds of testing, lab rat, meeting coordinator, etc. (I'm kind of saying this tongue-in-cheek, but the bottom line is that when you're young and cheap, and perhaps a bit underpowered, well we always need someone to fill the snack room and keep the copier filled with paper).
When you reach ~35, I'm really going to say 40, you (and your employer) need to have a very serious conversation. Typically you're not the cheapest guy in the organization any more. Either you fill a role a leader, an architect, a mentor, a specialized guru, etc. or you... uh, well, how'd you like to move into management? Sure there are always slots for "good" developers who are middle aged, but if you're not a student of history, you need to understand that there's a perception that you provide 25% more value than the 25 year old, but you cost 100% more. When it comes time to cut back, well... do I have to connect the dots for you?
I guess what I'm saying is this: if you're 40 and at the top of your game, the sky's the limit. I don't want to sound immodest, but I've been freelancing for ~15 years, and I'm turning away working all the time. I work incredibly hard to stay current, to stay relevant, to deliver value, etc. For every billable hour I work, there's another hour learning, invoicing, speaking publically, mentoring, etc. And I deliver focused, concentrated knowledge and value and relevant experience to my customers.
Having said that, if you're 40 and a middle-of-the-road kinda guy (or gal), well there are plenty of those, many of them younger and cheaper. Start looking over your shoulder. You're pricey, you're not respected by those less experienced (but perhaps actually more valuable than you), and you have a target on your back. If you're middling, either you just don't have the aptitude or ability, or (what's worse) you don't have the passion / drive. Either way, get ready to hit the bricks. I'm sorry, it's a cold world.
Most of the people I network with are also freelancers / independent consultants, but one thing that fascinates me, something that I've never experienced but I know it exists - the role of true gurus / experts *within* a company (typically a big one). I'm talking about guys like Jeff Dean at Google or Andrei Alexandrescu at Facebook. These guys could do incredibly well out on their own as freelancers, of course I suppose they do well with stock & options & perks, but still... I've always wondered what it's like to be a top-performer (industry-wide, not just in your little pond) within a larger organization. Do you get bored? Are you under-utilized? Is there a lot of politics & overhead? Or are you like a, excuse the term, "pig in shit"? Is the big organization exactly what you need to scratch those itches and pursue those crazy ideas that eventually become quantum leaps in technical circles?
Sorry the detour at the end, my point was more to explain the "fork in the road" at a certain age, but I figure this would be a great place to ask the question about super talent in larger organizations.
Ignore the kiddies and libertarian suckers' comments (I mean, if they were making that much, they wouldn't be wasting time posting here during the work day).
The real question is how long you have on your resume of you being out of work. The longer you're out, the less HR assholes want to talk to you. Back around '04 or '05, when I was *very* long "between positions", I applied for one that looked like it was written for me. Never heard anything, so I got annoyed enough to call the recruiter. She told me I "wasn't fresh".
That *really* pissed me off, so I asked her that if she took a year off to have a kid, would she never be employable again, becuase *she* "wasn't fresh"?
That took her back. She said she'd never thought of it that way, and actually put me in. Didn't get it, presumably because her opposite number thought the same way.
I also wrote a couple of articles I managed to get published in a mag. More on the resume. Did some F/OSS software, set it up as a project on sourceforge, and *that* went on the resume... and it also gave prospective employers examples of what I could do.
Anyway, one thing I did was to use some hair dye. Another thing was that a friend looked me up, told me he was starting a co, and had me do his co. website. I never got paid for that... but with his ok, the instant I made that website live, I had, on my resume, that I was "working" and the website as a bullet point. He was willing to answer calls that yes, I was working for him. Not that many months later, I finally started working again. Warning: you might have to work outside where you live, at least for a while (till you find something local), just so a) you can pay the bills, and b) have another point on the "yes, he's working now" check box.
A+ is useless. My son got it six or eight years ago, and no one would hire him, anyway. He went back for his 4-yr.
Best of luck.
mark
The answer is 42.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
But it doesn't sound like you're 60, though. It's well known there is a huge amount of agism in the tech industry. Doesn't matter how not-idle the poster is. He could be incredibly skilled, but not actually get hired. I mean, look at his skills! Java and C# is maybe 75% of the programming market: he's correct that he would already be hired if he was only 40.
There's literally no point in getting a degree in network administration if you already have a degree. The only reason to get any degree at all in that field is for those places that absolutely won't hire someone without one, otherwise you can get plenty of work with no degree at all. The network administrator classes teach you only the very basic material, most of which you probably already know and only a small amount of what they teach you is applicable in the real world anyway.
The best way to learn networking is by doing. Especially if you are talking about getting into Cisco, etc. There are so many specialized things out there, they may teach you basic stuff but the interesting stuff you learn OTJ. If you want to get into networking what you need to do is get a job for a consulting company that does only networking. It's hard, but if you're willing to accept low pay for a while the experience you get will allow you to jump to higher paying positions inside of a year or two.
Because you already knew the subject material, you consider something worthless? Wow.
Yes. When I'm being paid $100k+ for an impressively ambiguous job title (solution architect, systems engineer, etc.) I would expect a basic level of knowledge that the A+ doesn't improve upon. Yes, the State of Alaska required A+ for a job they paid someone $180 per hour to do. That's like requiring your airline pilots hold a driver's license. It's not related to the task at hand, and the knowledge is a presumed pre-requisite for someone above a certain level.
You probably think school is worthless too.
Well, yours certainly was. Someone with 13+ years as a programmer should already know everything in an A+ test, or should be unemployed.
Yes, certificates are an annoyance to those who already know the technology, but they're not the worthless things you're trying to portray them as.
I never said "they" were worthless, just A+ for a seasoned IT professional. Perhaps more of that "school" stuff you talk about could help you with your reading comprehension.
Learn to love Alaska