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?"

Comments

Ignore Silicon Valley

[turgid]

Ignore Silicon Valley.

50 years ago it used to be a hot-bed of science and technological innovation. Now it is a magnet for designer coffee-swigging social cloud blog web 2.0 get rich quick smartphone app hipsters.

Look for real companies designing and building real products for proper customers. Silicon Valley's day is gone.

Re:False premise

[gstoddart]

Also, older workers have higher costs for medical and sick leave and are more often injured on the job.

Oh for crying out loud, he wants to be a programmer ... do you know of a single job related injury of a programmer that didn't involve something involving a nomination in a non-fatal Darwin-award category (like chair races)? A freak mouse accident in which someone lost fingers? The coke machine falling on you?

Finally, who wants to hire somebody they know won't be working more than a few more years?

Ever heard the joke about the two bulls on the hill, and one says "hey, let's run down and fsck one of them cows"?

Sometimes experience and having learned some mistakes along the way can be very valuable, because not all of the kiddies have learned these things.

Kids straight of school may churn out large quantities of code and do cool things. But they also haven't yet learned all of the reasons for doing things with caution and diligence and all of the things which come with having spectacular failures.

Eventually, your skillset becomes more valuable for your breadth of experience and knowledge, than your specific ability to code.

For the poster, I would suggest that either you tough it out, or recognize that your ability to provide adult supervision and a longer view might be more valuable to companies (and in the long run you).

At a certain point, if you look like you're just gonna hang on in the corner doing the same old thing until you retire, your company might decide to get rid of you. I know people who started as Help Desk grunts, and have moved on to become Directors of entire departments, because they were smart, learned stuff, and became responsible adults. I don't know many programmers in their 50s who have done nothing but.

I'm in your cohort, give or take a little, there is life after programming. These days, organizations have more of an "up or out" mentality.