Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Will Older Programmers Always Have a Harder Time Getting a Job?
Theseuss writes "Given the strong youth culture associated with the modern day Silicon Valley startup scene, many times it falls to the 40-year-old programmer to prove that he can still use the newest up-and-coming technology. Yet the rate at which the tech sector is growing suggests that in 20 years there will be a an order of magnitude more 'old-hat' programmers in the industry. As such, do you think the cultural bias towards young programmers will change in the near future?"
Reach up and touch that glass ceiling. Caress it. Press your face up against it.
Then realize that you are putting it there.
I hate office politics and nonsense myself. I also realized that I was never going to make the salary that I wanted if I remained a sysadmin / engineer. Now I manage a team of DevOps guys and mentor their professional development. My goal is to give everyone of them the experience and potential to operate at my level, either when I move up, or when they get tired of working for me / the company and want to go somewhere else.
If you have not read The 48 Laws of Power, I highly suggest it. There is a quote in there, "Either you are playing the game, or you are a pawn in it." It is a harsh view of reality, but it is also inescapable. Either you take control of your own career and move up, or you end up reporting to people who are more ambitious than you are. In my situation, I had to do it out of self preservation. I cannot work for incompetent people, it drives me insane. So I out perform them, make sure that everyone sees what my contributions are, and accept the fact that I cannot succeed on my own.
That last piece is the most important. At the end of the day, you can only do so much as an individual. There is only so much that a single person can contribute to the organization. To be truly valuable, you have to be able to guide others and help a team collaborate to achieve a goal. As a programmer, if your code is so damn good that it belongs in a textbook, then you should be mentoring other programmers and helping them become better at what they do. If you are so fed up with politics and nonsense, you owe it to your organization to show them how to get things done, without resorting to all of that nonsense. Anybody can gripe about how things suck. Very few can provide alternatives.