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Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early?
caferace writes "I've been around the block. I'm a long-time worker in the tech industry (nearly 30 years), absolutely kickass SQA and Hardware person, networking, you name it. But I'm 50+ now, and finding new regular or contract work is a pain. And it shouldn't be. I have the skills and the aptitude to absorb and adapt to any new situations and languages way beyond what any of my college age brethren might have. But when I send out a perfectly good resume and use the more obvious resources there are still precious few bites for someone requiring to work remotely. Am I just whining, or is this common? Are we being put out to pasture far too early?"
Don't put your age on the CV and knock off the first 10 years of experience. My father worked IT contract work till he retired at 64 by doing this.
Sadly your experience is common. The older you get, the harder it is to find work.
So in your last decade or so, instead of saving for your retirement, you end up chewing through what little savings you have,
It's called the "American Dream".
As a I-O psychologist and researcher, this is fairly common. A lot of stereotypes are misattributed to the "older worker" and it happens a lot. In this world, organisations almost exclusively focus on attracting "young talent". Yet they fail to understand that older workers are far more experienced. Amongst misunderstandings is the notion that older workers would be (a) untrainable (b) too expensive (c) not creative, and (d) not flexible enough to adapt. This is all ruled out by research, but you know how it works with research. That's just "theory" and management wants "practice". So in short, you are not alone. As a matter of fact, there is a whole psychological discipline devoted towards this, called the "aging workforce".
You require to work remotely? Most managers cannot stand that - if you aren't there in the office so they can see that you are working, you must be goofing off, you cannot possibly be working. Judge you by your results? They wouldn't know how to do that, and they are far too harrassed/unimaginative/untrained to work out a method of doing it.
I've been in IT for more than 40 years, a contractor for the last twenty. In all that time, I have once had one contract that allowed me to work from home, and then it was just one day a week - and even then, in the middle of the contract, they tried to change it to all five days a week.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
As an older engineer, I've found that helping out the youngsters with their freeware and bringing lesons learned decades ago is rewarding, and professionally helpful. I can name at least 3 freeware or open source projects that I've been involved with for more than 10 years that get me recruiting calls from other countries. Very very few people have that much experience with it, my name has been in the developer mailing lists for that long, and I've done it as a matter of technical interest. Put those on your CV.
Also, companies that are migrating from older to newer platforms may welcome people who've worked extensively with both. As I've become older I've become the "local reference" for the older technologies. Simply having a hint of what the differences might be can same hundreds of man-hours of labor porting software or keeping the old system alive during the migration.
After 30 years working in software engineering and program management, I was turfed. The company I worked for had been acquired by a huge rollup company. We all knew what we coming, and come it did.
I survived eight layoffs and got caught in the ninth, four years after the takeover. This, even though I helped bring the kinds of technologies and software engineering talent that helped generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year in bottom line revenue.
In my case, the company had decided to ship manufacturing (a common "given") and engineering (something that surprised many of us) to China. The only thing the new company was interested in was increasing the value of the "leadership's" stock options. They didn't care what they acquired, just so long as they could strip assets and downsize and ship jobs offshore to fatten the bottom line. They honestly believed that what few jobs that were left in the US could be picked up by young engineers coming out of college. Cheap labor, right? Wrong. Particularly when they don't yet know enough and have no experience in highly specialized electronics and software solutions.
I wish I could find it, but I remember reading a German study that showed us old folks are more productive in a 24 hour work week than new or middle-aged workers working 35.5+hours a week. I know we older folks can really crank out the work, manage and maintain revenue generating business relationships, and can help the rich bastards make even more money than they already are if they'd keep us around, but...
Trans-national corporations, banks, and businesses really don't care how they generate their money and no one, not one single organization is upholding labor law that might, just might, hold these rogues accountable.
I've been looking for a job for over two years now. I can't believe the US job market is as tough as it has turned out to be. We hate to suffer like this, but I feel too old, that I know too much, and I'm too damned expensive for korporate Amerika. Too bad labor isn't organized and won't stand up for each other. It's every person for themselves, or so it seems to me.
As a small business owner in IT managed services, age absolutely does NOT matter to me. I'm more interested in a person's willingness to continue to learn and not stay stagnant. If you are in your 80s and have continued to learn on your own and want to stay engaged, I can do the heavy lifting ... that's no problem, welcome aboard. Attitude, experience, and wisdom trump youth every time. My marketing director is 25 years older than I am and I can constantly learn from him because he stays on the cutting edge and subscribes to lifelong learning. My brother has a mechanical engineer on his payroll that is 92 years old and is an extremely talented and creative guy. He can design something on paper in a mere fraction of the time it would take a lesser experienced engineer to do. Don't ever make the mistake of judging someone on age - judge on attitudes.
How exactly is a women going to have a baby and keep working? At least in my country there are some things I don't agree with like guaranteed seniority protection and accumulating vacation days while on maternity leave (so generally they take a year off then "come back" to 3-5 weeks of vacation). The seniority side of things: works well for low skilled jobs, putting cookies in a box it doesn't much matter after a few months what your experience is so in unionized jobs might make sense. But for skilled positions? I'm sorry a 30yr old women that has taken 2-3 years extra off in her career to have kids is not equal to a 30yr old guy that didn't all else being equal. She isn't equally deserving of a raise, promotion etc since she had less contribution to the success.
But for the military side of things: I've seen it in practice having been part of the army for a while. Women had smaller ruck sacks, fewer pushups, and sit ups required to get in etc. But you know what? The women that made it through basic kicked ass. My basic company had only about 5 women. 2 failed out due to injuries. Of the top 10 generally and specifically in shooting 2/3 of the women were in that group. A theory I've heard is women are more likely to listen to shooting instruction where as guys are either coming in already with bad practices from hunting or whatever or just wing it with bad form because we have the upper body strength to get away with a poorly handled machine gun (at least for a 5 round burst after which Rambos are all screwed). Also smaller ruck sack entrance requirements: after in basic they had to do everything to the same level, ruck sack size is fine because generally their clothes were smaller so everything still fit in the bag. The 60mm mortar doesn't get any lighter because a women is carrying it so the humped just as much weight as the men other than maybe 5lbs less that their clothes weighed.
I'd expect a systems admin to be able to diagnose a problem like that -- not that ours can. But most programmers I meet can't. They'll be trying to fix their code all day long when their system has bad ram.
Our customers have the same problem. They'll be asking why our software is slow on "just this one node". Telling us to "fix the bug".
I have to look through system call timings, application logs, kernel messages, kernel dev tools blah blah to give them evidence of what I already know. "it's a hardware problem. It seems this is a known failure pattern in the linux kernel for cache coherency errors betwen SMP cpus".. or whatever. We're an application vendor. I guess these companies spend enough money with us that it's worth it to my employer for me to play tinker-toy remote systems admin for them via proxy of systems debugging.
I get roped into these problems because no one else on my team can figure them out.
It pays.
-josh