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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A+ is useless except for getting past those clueless 25 year old HR drones.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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
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
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.