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Ask Slashdot: IT Career Path After 35?
An anonymous reader writes "All my friends seem to be moving towards a managerial role, and I'm concerned about my increasing age in a business where, according to some, 30 might as well be 50. But I still feel young, and feel like I have so much to learn. So many interesting technical challenges cross my path, as I manage to move towards larger and more complex projects. I am in higher demand than ever, often with multiple headhunters contacting me in the same day. But will it last? Is age discrimination a myth? Are there statistics on how many IT people move into management? I know some older programmers who got bored with management and successfully resumed a tech-only career. Others started their own small business. What has been your experience? Do you/have you assumed a managerial role? Did you enjoy it? Have you managed to stay current and marketable long after 35?"
Absolutely.
You'd have to pry the keyboard and mouse from my cold, dead hands. ;)
Hire a few people. Delegate. Train them. As your projects get more complex - grow your team. Before you know it - you're the boss of a sizeable team, able to manage several projects concurrently, whose portfolio grows exponentially. Unless of course you want to be pulling your own cart well into the 'standard' retirement age... Just a thought...
...and you'll never work another day in your life.
- Confucius
The reality of the situation is that you'll always find yourself doing something you hate, be it financial recordkeeping, slopping out the latrine or prepping the coffee machine for a hard day's thinking. Sometimes a drastic career change means starting at the bottom of the ladder again, bringing back memories of your first job at 16 fetching and carrying for the fat cunt in his leather chair, for minimum wage and zero gratitude. Deal with it.
Speaking for myself, I was never one to be sticking it to "The Man", I have always been "The Man", and will be "The Man" until the day I die.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I work with someone who started an IT career in their mid 30s in an entry level (help desk) position. I've seen people retire from IT from the same help desk, the same as I've seen people advance to other parts of the company and other government agencies. At 28 I'm actually the second youngest on our team. When I say help desk that's just the beginning too. We do production monitoring as well as being system operators.
You are NOT too old to start in IT!
sudo mod me up
Work for a medium sized/large, established company, not a startup run by kids. The only place I've ever seen agism is at startups where everyone is in their early 20s. They all think that they're the bees knees, and that no one could possible know better than them, and because they never hire anyone older, they never find out that they're wrong. At larger shops, you'll find a lot more experienced people who know that age is a benefit, not a detriment.
It should be your goal in life to become as financially independent as possible as early in life as you can. Being prudent about your mortgages, cars, investments, education etc. can enable you to be fully debt free early on. After you are debt free, most of your questions become easier to answer. If you owe nothing to nobody than it is easy for you to move on, start a business or look for a new possibility. A lot of people are in precarious positions where they are humiliated daily but cannot leave due to high debt loads and wanting the lifestyle they cannot afford without the bank's input. With the bank involved, you become a wage slave and are no better than the common surf of yesteryear.
Carefully cultivate your perceived value and age is far less of a concern.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm beginning to think the "eventualy move into management" when you get to your mid to late 30's is just the normal development path in IT. I'm desperately trying to avoid it, myself, but as I get older I constantly find management jobs being thrust in my direction.
That's working the private sector, of course. In the public sector, there was nothing to worry about, since nobody ever seemed to retire -- I could've stayed a programmer well into my 50's.
The alternative is to learn some skill that never seems to be fall out of use -- I see tons of graybeards in my company that do nothing but maintain aging AS400 and larger mainframe systems all day.
Honestly, they seem to be the happiest of the bunch...
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
The companies that discriminate on age are not the ones you want to work for.
There are plenty of companies out there that appreciate the older worker has more experience and is willing to pay for that. Probably not startups but who cares?
Myself, I'm in my early 40s and run my own little consultancy and life is pretty good with no end of decent clients in sight just yet.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
It starts at 35 for non-management IT staff....
I'm 52, and still programming. Not planning on stopping any time soon.
...
Keeping up with current trends is a must. My strengths are knowledge of C++, system programming, and the ability to work in large complex systems.
There are a lot of things I've learned, that are valuable, and not taught anymore.
A be reason for the age issue is younger workers in general tend to be cheaper. But then again, sometimes you get what you pay for
If so, pursue it. Don't do it because all your friends are becoming managers.
...the coffee almost shot thru my nose!
i'm 49, and still love solving technical challenges and learning new shit, so I still code...I must admit its getting harder and harder these days to be on a "team" of 20-somethings. It's very possible these folk I infrequently work with consider me a "loser" for still being in the trenches.
fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
maybe you will enjoy management, maybe not...perhaps give it a try for awhile and see how it fits you...you can always easily go back.
imfuo, the hardest part of *not* going into management is the social aspect of it.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
And still technical. 100% technical. There have been a few cases where I felt like I was denied a job because I was too old ... "not a good fit with company culture" and that sort of thing... but as others have said, those companies just disqualified themselves.
The reality is that I'm a better programmer now than when I was 25. I havre a much better understanding of "craftsmanship" -- things like testing, documentation, making sure my code is not "brittle" -- even though my ability to devour new technologies has slacked a bit.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
1) Practice stretching your anus for several months. Warning: this may lead to permanent incontinence!
2) Grab your ass with both hands and stretch for all you are worth.
3) Get a friend or family member to photograph your amazing "trick". Set up a shitty website, and the internet will cherish your memory forever!
I've noticed that guys how program in niche areas (such as computational acoustics) manage to stick with it as long as they want, if they really know what they're doing. Their domain expertise trumps ageism in the job market. OTOH, it's also a small job market, which affects things like where they can live.
After 17 years of being a software engineer, I kept getting asked questions. What do you want to do? Would you like to be a manager? I had exhausted the advancement in engineering and didn't want to be a manager. After the first layoff where I was a "lead" and the manager chickened out and asked me to do the layoffs, I resolved to not take a management role. I also started getting design questions. What's the best way to do this? How could I help make sure the design mistakes that plagued past product didn't happen again? How can we update the product for new platforms? And, connections outside company insisted I help them do some design work as well. The company I was at encouraged moonlighting, as long as it didn't conflict with your assignments 9-5. When I started making more money moonlighting than at the 9-5 job, I cut the ties and formed my own business. The first year was fantastic with the varied work, travel, and succcesses, but then I ran into issues with overhead (travel and health insurance). I was making ends meet, but it wasn't a gold mine. The jobs were crazy good, but the accounting and minutia of being in business weren't my thing. A majority of my jobs as a consultant had me running into my current employer. After about 6 months of back-and-forth, I jumped from private consultant to a full-time professional services consultant, where I've been for 15 years now. As I still felt entrepreneurial, I created several roles in the organization. Currently a design architect, it's the role I'll retire from unless something really good catches my eye. TL;DR software engineer -> consultant -> customer support -> consulting support -> architect over 30+ years, with the transition from software engineer to services happening at about 17 years.
As somebody that does code reviews (for security) and some development besides doing security consulting, I can state with conviction that most young coders do not know what they are doing. At least some of them get better with age. But the point is, hiring based on age is counterproductive for code development jobs. Of course, many managers think that young coders are "fresher" and they do cost less. Well, they are "fresher" as in "more clueless" and they do cost less for a good reason: They are less productive by sane metrics. They also talk back less, as they have far less of a clue.
So my advice is stick with what you love doing and search for an employer that has not succumbed to the stupid "young is better" fad.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My IT career didn't even *start* until I was 32 or 33, it's 20 years later now... and I'm doing just fine, thanks.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
How many time most these pointless questions be asked on /.?
I'm 35 and know plenty of folks who are my age (or some who are much older) who are in nuts and blots IT. They don't want to be managers and I don't blame them. I think the key is staying happy and staying relevant. Don't let your skills get stale and stay curious. That being said, if you want to move but not into a managerial role there are still technical things outside of pure IT. I moved into a systems engineer role on a sales team about 2 years ago and I absolutely love it. I work for one of the most well known companies on the planet, am based from home, make my own hours, and am very influential with my customers who are inexperienced with our products. I really see myself staying in this role for a long time.
I started out coding, then went into systems engineering, mostly server farms and LAN/WAN design, in my mid/late 20s. Then around age 30 I did go into management, operations and projects, for a number of years. Now, in my late 40s I am a senior network security engineer for a consulting firm. I make the same money I made in management (quite a bit) and have a lot more fun. You certainly can stay in or move back into technical roles past the age of 35.
No. It is very real.
I did the programmer/manager/director thing ending about 10 years ago when I was in my early forties. Since then, I've been doing the consulting thing, mostly strategic and management consulting into large companies. I'll say one thing: It pays very, very well and if you know how to handle an interviewer, you'll rarely be out of a job. The hardest thing back in the day was to give up on the hands-on work. It's what I knew, I was very good and passionate about it. That said, kids today ( I mean kids under 30 ) have their own mind set and find it hard to relate to older people in the work place. Bottom line, I prefer working with my peers and by the time I hit 40 I noticed I wasn't really interested in what the kids were doing. So I moved on. I have never encountered age discrimination because I've always focused on (difficult) work that requires lots of experience and made sure that the interviewer got the sense of my laser-like focus on the statement of work and providing value to the customer. Every company worth a damn needs an old man. I just hope I'm not too old before I decide to pack away my FORTRAN user guide for good.
There is plenty of jobs staying technical after 35. I'm in my mid-40's and recently switched jobs.
If you have relevant skills there will always be a position for you. Some companies even seek out older more experienced developers to help guide and mentor their less experienced teams. Keep learning, relevant and your saw sharp. Learn from guys like Uncle Bob, who have been doing this longer than you've been around: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
Know how to interview. Dye your hair. Keep relevant. Keep healthy. Have a niche. Have a plan b. Keep a good attitude.
The interview process will change. They know you have the ability to do the job. Questions are more around of do you give a shit, directly or indirectly.
Grey hair changes peoples mindsets about you, you can stop dying it once you are secure in the job. Or, just shave it all off. Dress young.
Bragging about cobol skills just annoys people and are next to worthless at most jobs. Know the latest do-hickey your co-workers are playing with, at least so you have something to talk about, even if your experience tells you the do-hickey is otherwise a waste of time.
Other people here talk about the niche.
Many older co-workers I know are incapable of doing the job because of bad exercise habits, energy levels, and other health issues. Stress oozes out and is sensed by others.
Have a plan b, a business on the side or simply make sure work is optional. Desperation makes for a strange interview and worse co-workers.
Most people are capable of doing any job, if they care. A bad attitude from a person skilled at dealing with others can be catastrophic. People have to pretend to care, especially for self-hypnosis. "If a prostitute can learn to pretend to enjoy her job, so can you."
Most people I have worked with older than 35 are failing at least one of these, if not several. Thing is, everyone fails a few of these, but they are more obvious in older workers. A bad eating habit is troublesome in a 20 yo, but nearly killer in a 40 yo. An attitude problem from someone skilled at manipulating others (because of years of experience being manipulated) can destroy a team.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
I am 50 now and have successfully avoided becoming a manager so far. For me, the key was to stay current with technology - these days it's all Hadoop and Java, and if all your recent work has been in C++ you are going to have a hard time seeming relevant to a lot of these companies. I feel like if I had switched to a management role I would have had a much harder time finding new jobs, partially because there are fewer management positions available than engineering, and also because I feel it's not my strength and I would not have been as good a manager as an engineer...
Unfortunately age discrimination isn't a myth. In large part this is because of the growing disparity in pay between new grads and experienced techinical people. Those making hiring decisions tend to assume that the new grads are just as, if not more, capable than those with years of experience. Since most IT employers tend to grant regular raises this means those with more experience tend to be more expensive and will sooner or later run into a glass ceiling unless they change their job category -- become a manager, start your own business, or become a consultant or contractor.
In my case I made the transition to management and found it totally frustrating in large part because I was a better technician than my technical people. For example I would look over a program that took one of my people a month to write and realize I could have done it in less than a week and that mine would have run faster and used a lot less code.
I beat the system by finding headhunters who specialized in contract and consulting jobs rather than full time employment. I managed to find two such firms who kept me fully employed doing work I liked until I was in my late 60s at rates far above what I would have made working full time.
Jerry
My advice would be not to go into management unless there is a way to keep your technical skills up. You won't find the headhunters as eager to place managers, except the highly technically adept ones. If you let your technical skills rot, it may become more difficult to stay employed.
I've worked as a developer, architect, project leader and "director of development" (whoa) and I prefer the technical contributor roles -- but that's just me.
As far as the companies that appear to be "age-ist" -- run away! A lot of that is done because the younger developers can be had for less money, they can and will work longer hours (usually because they don't have a family or really any life outside work) and they just don't know better. I can tell you from the times I have done "leadership" that I would rather have two skilled old-timers than four fresh-outs working on my team. The two old timers will almost always out-produce the four fresh-uts in terms of actual delivery and quality. So you get what you pay for.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
But it can happen.
I'm 43, and managing a group of software engineers at a streaming company; my peers range from early 30s to early 50s, but there are other managers and directors here who are (at least somewhat) older than that.
More importantly, though, there are engineers here who are older than me, and who you could argue are as senior as I am, or more senior (in either the "more people listen to them" sense or the "they get paid more than I do" sense). This company also has a strong belief that you shouldn't go into management because you want a promotion or more money, so people who enjoy being engineers are encouraged to continue being engineers. There's no salary cap on being an engineer, and for pretty much as long as I've been a manager here, I've had engineers reporting to me who made more money (sometimes, significantly more money) than I do.
Having demonstrated pretty decent Individual Contributor (IC) skills, my last two bosses have always said that if I ever got tired of management and wanted to do the IC thing again for a while, they'd be delighted to find a slot for me.
But that's us. And we aren't representative of the business, I suspect. We're not QUITE the outlier -- high tech company, Silicon Valley, ~16 years in operation -- but we're definitely not your 20-person SOMA startup running on Red Bull and testosterone.
I'll tell you one life lesson my parents taught me, though, that has served me well: Figure out what you love doing, and do that. You'll occasionally be buffeted off-course. That's OK -- get back on-course.
I've been married for about 7 years now; early in our relationship, when I was an IC in another company, making a lot less money, my wife argued I should be thinking about maximizing my family's income and financial stability and go into management just because of that; she persuaded me, and I went into management at that company, and was profoundly unhappy. Finally, luckily, got laid off in 2009. We both learned our lesson, and these days my wife's only rule is "pick a job that will make you happy; if we need more money I'll go out and make it." Works well.
The story that I've heard repeated often is that developer salaries tend to flatline in a person's 50s and even retreat a bit as they close out their careers, while managerial salaries continue to increase throughout the later years of a career. Whether this is supported by actual data or not, I don't know. I can certainly see the potential for this to happen with developers who get complacent in a long-term job where they've maxed out their career path and then get laid off, which could force them to take a significantly lower-paying job elsewhere. I've transitioned from development into management over the past few years, largely because I'd endured a string of awful managers and was confident I could do a better job. Management is definitely not for everyone, though -- it requires a different set of skills from development, and many developers lack the patience and people skills needed to do the job well. But developers with an interest in and aptitude for management clearly make the best managers for development groups, because they have a deep understanding of the issues their teams face, and they have a much easier time building trust and credibility with the group. In the end, it's really about where your skills and interests lie. Do you have the patience to deal with petty office politics, hand-holding MBAs through repeated explanations of the mythical man month, fielding complaints from your team that you're too focused on schedule and complaints from above that you're not focused enough on schedule? Do you get gratification out of identifying and building on your developers' strengths and helping them earn their way to a promotion? Do you enjoy solving problems related to scoping, sequencing, and balancing of other people's work to define and meet milestones? Do you mind dealing with software licenses, office supply purchases, and other mundane "care & feeding" tasks? Can you be content relegating coding to a hobby activity, rather than your main pursuit? If you answered "yes" to all of the above, then it may be worth considering a management path. If not, then you should stay sharp, stay current, and keep your skills valuable and marketable, regardless of your age.
I retired from the US Navy at age 39 in 2005. I was an Electronic Technician, so I was in a technical field but not IT - I primarily maintained HF/UHF radios and radars. I got my CCNA just before I retired and got a job as a network engineer. That contract lasted until earlier this year. I had no problem finding a job at 49 and I'm still getting calls from recruiters. I'm currently working at a NOC and I'm the shift supervisor. In the last position, I moved up to Lead Engineer for the last four years. So you could say I do a bit of low-level management, but I'm not management per se. I'm just supervising entry-level techs and still spend most of my time performing technical duties.
I've been in software development for 38 years, and my favorite years have been spent doing Mac or iOS development (Mac in the 80's, and Mac or iOS for the past seven years). I write apps as a hobby, which helps keep my skills current, and my employer is (mostly) paying me to do what I enjoy; it doesn't get better than that.
To be honest, writing software for an employer can be a drag, because corporate decision-making processes can be frustrating. But I spent about 10 of those years with some degree or other of a management role, and those frustrations are even worse in middle management. I'm much happier as an "individual contributor". The upsides to corporate development are the benefits and reasonably steady paychecks.
Age discrimination? Maybe; I get along better with some people than others (and vice versa), and maybe age is a factor. I don't really hide my age (I like to inject "Get off my lawn!" into conversations every now and then), I don't try to pretend I'm someone I'm not. I think if you're doing what you like and are engaged as a team member, it all works out.
I think I still have about 5 more years in me, unless my plan/hope/dream of earning a modest income at independent development bears fruit before then.
Title: how to remain...
Shit's only changed for people that are constantly jumping from job to job. Sounds like subby is one of them (you sound like one too).
For those of us "older" IT professionals that actually stay at one company this isn't an issue at all.
Find a good company that exposes you to the challenges you want, pays well, and has benefits and then stick your ass in the chair and stay there. You'll soon come to realize that yes job security actually does exist.
Yes, you're right. For example, 20 years ago there weren't little shits going around calling people fucktard in public forum back then. If you're having trouble in the market place, perhaps you should try a little introspection.
..and reasonably happily being a contract analyst/developer without any issues.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Yes, there defiantly will be 17 year old entrepreneur out there who will not hire you. When jobs and zuckerberg were working out of their garage I doubt you would of had a chance in hell of getting a job even if you were willing to take less and had more experience than the peopel they did end up hireing. At the same time there are loads of companies out there that will give an older guy preferential treatment over a kid. Also companies will be far less likely to overlook things as you age. There are loads of complete crap programmers of there and a lot of them still get jobs, as they age they are more and more likely to have their lack of skill and continued lack of learning go unnoticed.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...why people tend to move towards managerial roles. In my experience, the answer is because that's the only way to get a bigger paycheck.
Badly run companies (IMHO) tend to undervalue experienced IT personnel, thinking that they are peons and can be eventually replaced with cheaper post-college labor (or offshore labor). The people having this thought process tend to be upper-management, who were never technical to begin with. Now, those upper-management folks don't like interfacing with 20-somethings or offshore teams. So they promote older developers to managerial roles and pay them more. Now they can interface with someone their own age (and someone who frees them from having to understand any technology).
This is where the cycle begins... Once you've gotten promoted to be a manager, you start to take on that upper-management mindset. You entrench yourself (i.e., making it "impossible" for them to fire you) and really start to play politics. All the while, the IT people working for you slowly start to see you as one of "them" instead of their technical team lead / mentor.
I like it when I see companies that are run by people (CEO, upper management, etc) that are still technical.
It's when you let the MBAs take over that things start to go pear-shaped.
only matters how many beers you can drink.
If you can't drink as many as you once could, you should get out of the game and let the young kids play.
We don't all do that you insensitive fucktard!
I started in IT in my early 30's and I work as a consultant at a small consulting company that I don't own. I am now almost 50. Throughout my career, I have stayed up to date on technology and gotten certified at a high level in everything relevant. I am technical and my income is 6 figures. Right now I specialize in storage and virtualization technologies, and I hold storage industry certs that are only available to EMC employees and partners. These limited-access certs have a lot of value. As technology trends shift, so will I. I will never move into management, as my value is in my technical skill, not my people management skills.
I have no interest in doing anything in IT besides programming and closely related tasks. Everything else bores me. I've been in several roles where I've had to wear various hats including BA, some project management, architecture, etc. and I couldn't imagine doing any of that in a full time capacity. I suppose if you're working at a company trying to advance your career, eventually you hit a wall where you can't advance any further in a purely technical role, without either going into project management, management, or possibly becoming an architect. If you want to avoid that, and have an in demand skillset, one good option is to become a consultant. Of course it involves more risk, and a willingness to move around and adapt to different environments. But the advantages (besides more money) include having freedom to determine what projects you want to do, having a lot of variety, not having to deal with corporate politics and HR bs, and generally being able to focus more on the technical aspects of the project. Also consultants tend to be engaged because of their experience, so having been around the block a few times can be advantage. If you have the right personality and circumstances for it, then it's definitely something to consider. If going completely independent is not for you, then there's always the option to become a salaried consultant with an established company. You won't have as much freedom to pick and choose projects, but there's more stability, and you can still maintain that technical focus on a variety of projects.
20 years ago there weren't little shits going around calling people fucktard in public forum back then.
Yes there were. Have you heard of USENET? I was first called a fucktard in a public forum in 1984.
At 35 you're just getting started. I'm 51, and in the past couple of years Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, and other major companies have repeatedly tried to recruit me. Just keep developing your skills.
I'm 65 and still programming, still learning.
In 45 years in this industry I've seen and used many languages, technologies.
I remember core as a memory technology, I've used FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG and countless other languages.
And several times I've gone into the "management" track, then returned to what I enjoy.
Today I work with fascinating JavaScript libraries (e.g. D3) for graphics and visualization.
The advice I'd give is "Become an expert at important parts of your current technology platform. And keep finding and exploring what will replace it".
In addition, understand what matters to the industry your products are in.
Never, ever, become a disposable coder.
It might seem enticing to move into a management job but it's not for everyone. The skills that have made you an excellent programmer might not necessarily make you a good manager. I often use sports analogies to illustrate this. Look at all of the former outstanding athletes that have been utter failures as coaches and/or general managers.
The other thing to consider is this: if you are a good programmer it is probably because you really enjoy it and have worked hard at it to improve. Are you going to enjoy being a manager? Because if you don't really enjoy it then those 2 hour meetings are going to seem like they last all day long.
I have tried my hand at management and it's not for me. Most of the meetings seemed like, for me, a waste of time. I liked fixing code that didn't work. I didn't like fixing other peoples petty personnel squabbles. Lower and middle management can be a real wasteland. I looked around the room and I saw a lot of people that were not very good at what they did. Many of them seemed resigned to the fact that they were never going to get promoted into upper management. Many of them exhibited poor leadership and decision making skills. The worst part of it was all the politics and back stabbing. I just couldn't stomach it.
So I decided to stick with what I enjoy and what I'm good at.
Having said all of that, it was a valuable experience. I admire good managers. It's a tough job. If you are fortunate enough to have a good manager then count yourself lucky. Being a manager gave me valuable insight into the "other" side of business - the non technical side of it.
If you want to stay with programming you can. I know a lot of people in their 60's that are working at it and doing well. Unfortunately, all of them are consultants. Age discrimination is real. But as a contractor, employers see you differently. Instead of being a medical liability you are praised for your experience.
That was TWENTY YEARS AGO, fucktard. Shit's changed since then, in case you haven't noticed (and considering you're a boomer fucktard, I'm expecting you haven't).
Yeah, shit's changed since then... including the GP's age, which has gone up, so if agism is worse now than 20 years ago, he might have experienced that...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Do what you love and are good at doing. A lot of people in management are definitely not cut out to be managers. (At least where I work) people tend to get promoted into roles of supervision and management because they're good problem solvers, but being a manager involves a completely different skill set. If you enjoy supporting people and teams, making it easier for them to do their work, getting them the information that they need, ensuring they have the professional development and work environment to thrive... then yeah, work on becoming a manager. If you like what you're doing and you're in high demand... then keep doing that. Don't fix what isn't broken.
That was TWENTY YEARS AGO...
Hey, you're pretty smart.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
That bit had me laughing, too. You can still *find* some of my old Usenet threads, especially about old technologies, as the top Google links for certain keywords.
Fear is the hardest thing to get over on the road to being happy. And for this purpose, I'll define happy as "doing what you want", both professionally and in the rest of your life. If you want to keep doing what you're doing, then you should just do that. Don't worry about what your friends are doing. If you want to go start your own business, then you should just go do that. If you want to write code until you're 50, you should do that. You're probably pretty bright and perhaps you haven't realized it yet, but because of that you'll always be employed. Don't worry about your job, you'll find another and if you want to switch career paths, it's probably easier than you think. I know those pay checks are comfy and they arrive regularly. That health insurance you probably don't use much is comforting too. You're probably afraid what might happen to your family if you decided to chance upon something different. Just keep in mind, the market or perhaps even the company you work for has very carefully determined the bare minimum it should pay you or otherwise compensate you to keep your job. If you're already happy, keep doing what you're doing. If you're not happy, stop being afraid. (Just a bit over a year ago the company I worked for slowly melted down over the course of the summer. Losing my job was the best thing that ever happened to me. Along the way to where I'm at now, I had to take some small risks - at each turn life got better.)
----- obSig
Started IT when I was 28 with just a high school education. Taught myself how to code. Now I am 56 and I am still coding. My current position allows a great deal of freedom on how I implement a solution and the IT department has been ordered by senior management to help me. I work directly for the end users and I know their business very well.
I'm 48 and my career has been Unix Sysadmin since '92. My degree was Mechanical Engineering, but I've always "played" with computers.
My last job was for 9 years doing security on top of the sysadmin. Mostly Solaris, though I did a transition 2 years ago of our windows environment from Windows 2000 AD & XP to Windows 2008R2 (2, replicated) and Windows 7. With GPOs to configure security settings. I also had HP-UX, Tru64 and RHEL in this environment. Oh, and helped setup another envionment on VMware vsphere 5.
While I was doing that at work, I started to learn about OpenStack by reading, attending user groups and using it at home. In fact, my VMware at work was accelerated by teaching myself VMware ESXi 3 at home a few years earlier.
My current job is DevOps deploying OpenStack clouds for our developers and shipping that to customers (with little Unix experience) to make small clouds our stuff works on. I got it because I've had the enthusiasm to learn it and bring that to work. All my experience with Windows AD, security, Solaris is not used; I've thrown away that skill set. My ability to adapt and learn is the important part. And get the project done.
It took me a month start to finish to get my current job.
I'm leading IT & operations for a startup, but it's also a startup that isn't run by a bunch of 20-somethings. I was brought on board by one of my former CTOs who started his own company. It definitely pays to not burn bridges, network, and keep your skills going. Personally, I'm not management type. I enjoying leading teams and such, but I will NEVER step away from keyboard.
This issue is coming up every few weeks. Must be a hot topic for a lot of us.
My answer is the same, every time. I'm 60, I've been developing software for about 35 years, right now I make Android apps. I'm happy, and I think I'll stay in this business for one or two more decades.
So what's your point?
no, I don't have a sig
I'm 44 and still very vital. At least I hope so, feel it, and more importantly am still paid it (?) :) /users and pepper them where I can. Still put up with Windows as needed. Linux as a backend still rocks, but few desktop deployments there (sadly). I'm a Mac head myself given the choice. :)
It depends on what makes you "tick" I suppose. Me, I am "IT".
- Coding as needed, but day in and day out -- ack (!) I wouldn't do it.
- I Can make a decent website (so I have an "eye"), but wouldn't / can't do _it_ professionally. I know who to call if you need to sell widgets aka Amazon style, couldn't code it if I wanted to though. Know your limitations.
- Networking - physical and logically. I run the cables, terminate, setup / layout wifi's covering hundreds of thousands of feet in area, etc.
- File management, access layout (some VNC, others AFP, and also available is RDP and ARD -- SMB requires a VPN which may be PPTP or L2TP as needed). Do it all myself.
- I prefer OS X desktops
- No problem integrating "other" systems (usually suck them into a Linux box), anything from Insteon / X10 to fuel pump monitoring and alarms, or the various PBX systems, etc. Good engineering background -- figure it out. I was turning off my lights remotely 25 years ago... Now it's cool, but for me it's "old school". Family business used to be in printing presses (man that went to shit) -- but with it access to lots of high voltage and low voltage contact type relays that were trivially programmable...
I'm really the geek for the geeks. Happy making a bit over 6 figures, and get to make my own hours for the most part... There's other things in life too... :/
I like to work for mom / pop type companies in the 10-50 million range of sales; it's where I'm comfortable. IBM, Apple, Google -- would ROCK, but that life style just isn't for me. Sure, I could make much more (I'm sure), but it would also cost me a pretty penny. To live in silicon valley is not cheap. Nor is my sanity.
Maybe I'm lucky and just found my "nack" and have had all the right contacts along the way...?
I didn't ever really encounter it until I passed 50. You have some time yet to figure things out. Unless you *LOOK* old, then you're screwed ;-)
Also, age discrimination is common, but definitely not universal. There are plenty of employers who value experience--as long as you don't stagnate, and it sounds like you're the type who will never do that.
As a 28 year old programmer with just a few years of experience and only just about to finish off my BSc. in CS, I'm often worried about getting too old for this field. Seeing comments from people still coding in their 40s, 50s, & even 60s really reassures me. Thanks guys.
Speaking as someone who did work his way and just got demoted after only 5 months I have to say management is not for everyone.
You think (l)users are annoying as helpdesk or desktop support? Wait til they make unreasonable demands, bash you, attack you and your team, and promise customers things without your knowledge that you can not possibly deliver and then hold you accountable when it fails while they take a bonus?
That folks sounds like hell but is management 101. Granted I have incompetent managers at my company (I was probably one of them due to me being demoted) but it is all bullshit, soothing hotheads, and looking like you got your shit together when you don't.
If you have aspergers or some mild social disorder like a lot do in IT then management is not for you as it requires a whole different skill sets. If you are fast talking salesmen who knows jack about IT then you can be a great IT manager as your job is not to get yourself and your team fired.
I had literally nightmares about work 5 nights a week and woke up at multiple times in the night to check email on my phone. I could not tell someone else please include me in that meeting and no this can not be done by X as you waited until the last minute and a lack of planning on yoru part should never be an emergency on my part. That line got me demoted as I had to move 4 companies and set VLANs and several hundred pcs when the wiring was not even fucking in yet in 3 days. ... end rant.
Programming managers have this too when sales promise a product features that do not exist and they get a slap on the back for a good job and a bonus and the IT manager is threatened with termination if 6 months worth of work is not done in 2 weeks etc.
I would even go on to say of all management IT management is the worst out there besides restaurant.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm a 20 year old network security student at a tech school where my teacher is 36. Now teaching isn't the way to go for everyone but this man owns his own business (unrelated to technology), has more certifications than I can dream of right now, and still gets offers for contracts. He insists that no matter how old you are there is still more to learn and places to go. He still doesn't have his Security+ and that's his goal for this year. I say keep on trucking to whatever you want to be and never stop learning new things. There is a point where your age will come a problem but these days as long as you keep yourself healthy and make sure you get more updates in the tech field than your personal machine gets from microsoft, you'll never stop being valuable.
Q: Do I enjoy being in IT?
A: Yes. I have no interest in being a manager. It largely consists of doing paperwork and placating people who don't have a clue.
Here's a question for you. Do you really enjoy learning new things and doing programming? If so you can have a lifelong career doing something you enjoy in IT.
If your internal sense of value is more about your connections to people than pride in your ability and work then you should head toward management.
Asking other people what you should do indicates you really need to spend some time understanding yourself. Other people can't do it for you
I think agism is real in some environments, but it varies company by company and it's actually getting better.
If you keep coding, and if you establish a reputation as someone that knows what they are doing you should be fine. Building relationships is key, but not in some cheesy way. If you're passionate about software and get along with people and treat them with respect, that should be enough. At least it has been for me.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
I am about to turn [ahem] 60, and have been writing software professionally for 35 years. I long ago made the conscious decision not to go into "management" and in fact have never had a manager title. Team Lead, Project Lead - sure - but never Manager.
There were a few years after the 'Internet bubble' and again during the Great Recession where it was tough to find a job, but those were the years I did freelance work while learning new skills. And that's the deep dark secret - never rest on your laurels. If the key to being in sales is ABC (Always Be Closing) the the key to long-term survival as a programmer is ABL - Always Be Learning. The business lessons you absorb over the years will remain applicable and make you valuable, as long as you also master the new technologies and new languages that come along.
Mudge
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they're not.
I'm 43. After having been sucked in management in two occasions, two years ago I've joined the core team at Stack Overflow as a full stack developer.
I've never been happier.
Age was useful because it gave me more time to enrich my knowledge and experience.
My Stack Overflow user
I am still in dev role because I love code. Don't want to move into management role as it would bore me. No hassles getting job due to experience
I code because code! :)
I'll be 46 soon; been (basically) a UNIX sysadmin for the better part of 20 years. I chose not to pursue management as I saw early on the detachment from daily work and increased politics, meetings, etc But I have to wonder, how long my own situation can last. There are changing technologies (cloud, now) but there's a risk of stagnation if you don't push yourself.
The headhunters contact me, too. I'm well aware that a bulk of them are simply looking to stuff you into a position so they can get paid. I reject about 90% of the inquiries I receive, especially when it's very clear they didn't read my resume or statement of experience.
The market feels like it's changing, and with that I wonder about us "older" folks. I remember years ago, there was a hesitance to hire older people due to the perception of obstinance and/or being difficult to re-train, etc. Since then, I believe that perception has been scientifically nullified.
But the larger bottom line for some of us is risk. Many of us suffered from the dot.com deflation, some may not be able to afford to retire; some were smart and banked out just in time and won't have a care in the world. The fact remains the older you get, the more risk you carry with career and job changes. And that risk is even higher if you have a family to care for.
I suppose it's something that requires very careful consideration. But I can't see myself in a management-only position -- I like being involved in some of the gritty work -- though, I admit there are times where I'd like to delegate :-)
I work for a small startup in Silicon Valley and I will say the brutal truth. Most coders under 35 have no idea what the fuck they are doing. So assuming you do know what you are doing then you have a lot more value than an inexperienced 25 year old.
When I was last looking around a few years ago, I had a company come out and say that my age (early 40's back then) might be a problem for the chemistry in the office (mostly mid to late 20s?), but they were the exception. Everyone else was interested in the projects I had worked on and the tech I had been using.
So... I'm sure the discrimination is out there, but there are also a ton of companies that value the experience a person with some time under their belt can provide.
If so, pursue it. Don't do it because all your friends are becoming managers.
This, IMO, is the single hardest question that a software engineer will face in his career. The choice is hard and the situation is really confusing, because different shops attach a different meaning to the manager title. Sometimes these are just leads that get promoted and they still own their respective projects. Sometimes they are just projects managers. Yet sometimes the whole thing is blurred into madness by insanely tall hierarchies and inapt managers who want to micromanage their staff.
My advice is to sample the lead role and then learn what the manager really means in your company.
When the response of industry leaders and Congress to the collapse in the jobs market of 2000 was to increase H-1b worker visas, it should have been a signal to any sane youngster US citizen (who wasn't an Asian immigrant) to steer clear of the IT industry. Yes, there are jobs that are well paying and yes there are a lot of US citizens, even older US citizens, who are getting them despite the insane guest worker policies pursued by Asian ethnic nepotism taking over Fortune 1000 IT hiring authority.
But think about the way casinos operate: When someone wins at the slots, the machines make lots of noise but when someone loses at slots, there is dead silence.
If you are a non-Asian US citizen, there are better ways of terminating your bloodline than getting a degree in IT, such as suicide bombing some of the industry leaders that expanded the H-1b visa program when the jobs market collapsed in 2000.
Seastead this.
You're too old. You probably have a family, which means you won't be willing to give work extra hours which you would rather spend with your family. They're a liability. If you don't have a family, it means you're a loner which in turn means there's something wrong about you. Or you're divorced, which means you were not able to make a relationship work. You're a bad investment, sorry. And in computing, experience counts for nothing. They hire either younger people who have their best work ahead of them instead of behind (and are also more subject to blackmail) or H1Bs who will work for a fart up their nostrils and a kick in the nuts. You're old, finished, over. Deal with it.
I also started in IT when I was in my early 30s, about 15 years ago. At the age of 45, I was lucky to find a software development job at a university.Yes, the pay is significantly lower, but I rarely exceed the 35-hour workweek (2-3 times in six years). There is flexibility that allows me to be a single parent that my previous 60-100-hour weeks and insane deadlines never had. I have the respect and cooperation of my peers and superiors. I have the opportunity (not taken yet) to take six university courses (anything I like) a year.
When I interviewed for the job, they asked me the standard question, "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" Given that I'm a senior programmer, the only way up would be into management, so I replied, "doing exactly the same work, that I love, but doing it much better".
Being part of an organized workforce (I'm part of the United Steelworkers of Canada, for some bizarre reason), I have a reasonably good chance of continuing to learn and develop my skills until I decide to stop -- but I'm having too much fun to see that happening anytime soon.
Jesus. Get smarter about what you do instead of worrying about twitch speed or raw coding monkey speed. I am 60 yrs old and have been steadily employed in Silicon Valley as a senior software engineer, software architect, team lead etc for all of that time. If you love software and are good at it there is no reason to switch to management unless you simply want to.
I am a 48 year old senior network engineer at the top of my game. VMs, SANs, BGP routing, all that stuff. I am in high demand for onsite project implementation. If you are worried about losing marketability in your 30's, far from seasoned or having depth of experience IMO, you are not keeping your skills sharp and should look for an alternate career path.
I was first called a fucktard in a public forum in 1984.
Maybe it's you?
I became a video game tester and a lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple personality disorder) when I was 28-years-old. Most kids entering the business don't believe that video game existed before they were born. I used to freak them out by introducing them to a tester who worked on arcade video games in the 1980's and another tester who worked on pen-and-paper games in the 1970's.
After three years of testing video games and three years of being a lead tester, I went into help desk support at the tender young age of 34. That was 11 years ago. These days I'm doing security remediation by consoling into hurt computers and fixing broken users. Most of my coworkers are in their 50's. The nice thing about info security is that you really need to have 10+ years in I.T. experience. A high hurdle for kids coming out of school and H1B candidates from India. This field is expected to grow in the years to come.
I spent my 20s, 30s, and 40s having adventures. Among other things, I built a 35 ft sailboat and lived on it. At age 50 I got married and settled down to raise a family, so I needed an inside job. I had been doing computer stuff for years, so I taught my self programming and began a new adventure. At 73 I'm still working as a Web/database developer in all of the newest Microsoft technologies.
As for keeping current, some years I have given up my vacation to catch up quickly with new technologies my job required. You just do it.
...unless you really want it and understand what you are getting into.
I second the head hunter evaporation. I used to get a lot of calls as a DBA but two years ago I stepped up to management and not one call since unless they are asking me if I have openings. I've tried to stay hands on but it's next to impossible once you get caught up in all the management requirements - hiring, motivating, dealing with personnel's personal problems (you have no idea how big of a pain in the arse people are until you manage them), budgeting, executive management nonsense (guess what you, you get to be their personal helpdesk!). For every one policy a worker has I have like 10 more that'll get me fired. I love tuning in to Slashdot to see workers whine about their managers - until you've been one you'll never understand.
As far as age discrimination - I'm 41 and in my long IT career I've been heavily discriminated for being "too young". Also, In the US the age discrimination laws were changed about 2-3 years ago to include 40 and older. I hire on attitude and aptitude. The price between young and old talent is no different so don't believe the nonsense about hiring younger is cheaper. It's only cheaper when you get some mid-grade no good that sits in his position for decades consuming the annual minimum increases for their minimal effort and HR won't let you do anything about it because they haven't violated an policies. That's when IT managers go nuts and do things like outsource to get around having to deal with slackers. I just make a phone call to the outsourcing company and poof, new employee - no whining, no "my neighbor's dog barked all night so I can't come in today", no HR paperwork, etc...
In all other "professional" disciplines (law, medicine, financial, engineering etc) your worth increases with age - except software engineering.
In software engineering you are viewed as "expensive and outdated" once you reach middle age.
You wouldn't get a graduate lawyer to handle your divorce, a graduate med to operate on you, or a graduate to advise or complete your tax returns.
Yet graduates are just fine, cheap and dandy for writing that great App idea someone has which is going to make them rich and keep you in subways for a couple of weeks.
I'll be pointing this out to my kids if they try to follow me into the profession I thought was a good bet.
The consumers view of software is that it's "valueless", free and their birth right to obtain it without cost.
Which is why they get pissed if they are asked for even a tiny amount of cash to use it.
I get regular hate emails from people who download my Apps, which give them enough to try out the product before they purchase, telling me how much I suck.
My standard response to them is "beggars and buskers make more and give you less. You'd think nothing of tossing 99c in the hat of a stranger on the street yet you can take the time to email me telling me that my months of labor aren't worth the same?"
The cost of software is largely hidden in services, advertising (Google) or hardware (Apple).
So the perceived value of an software engineer is hidden.
That public perception isn't helped when one of our legion makes it big, like Mark Zuckerberg.
It gives me great satisfaction to see someone like Zuckerberg take an idea, execute it well, and reap the rewards.
The Winklevoss are an excellent example of all that's wrong with society's attitude towards engineers.
So my advice is, do what I did, do an MBA.
Once you have that title and a bit of experience in business you aren't just the "geek in the corner" you are the guy in the room who understands the whole picture better than anyone else there.
You'll find your own "stock price" on the rise once more.
I have turned down promotions because I want to be 100% technical. I am not interested in climbing a ladder unless the ladder is a technical ladder. I am not yet ready (and not sure I will be) to give up some time to dealing with non technical issues. If you feel happy with 50% technical and 50% management then find something like that which suites you. Right now I am happy with focusing 100% of my time on solving technical issues.
I think that over a certain age, it people should consider becoming freelancers and eventually grow their business hiring other it consultants to help them...
Age doesn't matter - I've had multiple rather old people on my team of software engineers. Age really doesn't matter.
However, as you get older and your knowledge and experience grows, you will get parasites. Instead of applying your knowledge and experience developing software like you used to, you will be answering all kinds of questions, performing little chores etc. because you happen to know how to because of your experience... to the point that you can no longer just be a software engineer. Research has shown that after each interruption it takes about 17 minutes to get back to the job. On average. For complex coding jobs, this time may be much longer and just a single question about something important but not directly related to your job may get you out of the flow for the rest of the day.
You may need to switch jobs to avoid this; once you start getting more than a handful of such requests that are not part of your coding job, run.
Also, consistently being an asshole may prevent this. But that's probably similarly detrimental to you career...
0x or or snor perron?!
I'm a developer in my mid 30's, but I did a 6 month stint as an IT recruiter a few years ago after a layoff and dry spell.
Ageism is real. It varies depending on what part of the industry you're in, so this is general overview. On paper you're basically good through your mid 40's. In person is another story. Even if you're 40, if you're shot out and have lots of grey hair you're going to be treated how you look. As you hit 50, discrimination is a given for anyone not applying for a very senior role: management, executive, architect, director. I spoke with plenty of guys that were turned off by those upper level roles and wanted to stay connected to the technology. I get it, but if you're 50+ and theoretically someone that is in their late 20's early 30's could be applying for the same job, you're in trouble.
Advice: remove stuff from your resume that isn't relevant or dates you. Your resume should only be 2-3 pages anyway. If you're a journeyman, only include the last 15 years of relevant experience. If you're going for a developer position, no one cares about the job you had packing groceries in 1976. All that does is give hiring managers an idea of how old you are. You want them to focus on skills/experience. Got a fancy degree? Great. If you got it before 1990 you might want to take the date off. The basic idea is they shouldn't be able to figure out how old you are by looking at your resume. Get your foot in the door for an in person interview. 90% of hires are about a connection made during the interview. Yeah technical grillings and white board sessions are common, but at the end of the day they always pick the person they can envision themselves working with 40-60 hours a week.
If you want to stay close to the technical details and not have to move into management or worry about getting hired by someone 20 years your junior, now might be a good time to look at listings from city, county, state and federal governments. Government employees are rarely laid off and the insurance and retirement benefits are often very good. If you start later in your career, the retirement benefits can be worth 20% of your salary or more.
Down sides to government work include limited advancement potential and lack of exciting new projects, along with a lot of bureacracy. Typically there are professional bureaucrats who handle the bureacracy so coders don't HAVE to. Technicians just have to be patient and wait for the bureacracy to slowly do its thing before "starting" (releasing) a project. That's okay if you don't mind working ahead and doing a lot of housekeeping while waiting for your next project to be approved.
I'll be turning 50 soon and I am starting a new job tomorrow as a Senior Sys Admin. I find that as I get older, I get better. I can do thing in a few minutes that others take a week to do ( if they can even do it). I learn new languages in a couple of weeks. I have coded in over 30 now.
People who think IT careers end by 35 shouldn't have been in IT to begin with.
In fairness, the line, "A lack of planning on your part is not an emergency on my part" *should* get you fired. It's the kind of thing that you think, but then the filter in your brain kicks in and you say something more diplomatic. If you actually said that to someone, then you deserved to be fired for being immature and unprofessional.
Just hit 57 and working on node/express + html5 + jquery + couchdb on top of legacy PHP/MySQL backend. Planning to start rewriting the backend in grails, hopefully soon.
What I've learned: solve the immediate problems at hand, deliver early and often, and don't worry about potential issues that may not manifest themselves or might be lower priority by the time you confront them.
The biggest problem I've seen is that projects kill themselves through overengineering by ambitious young folks with big dreams. The fact is, boring old analysis and dreaded working with the customer are the keys to success. Solving the day-to-day problems of a business is essential, not transformative solutions that take years to develop and are a crapshoot at best.
Also, there are a lot of small, established companies that have interesting problems to solve, and if you're good, you can help choose the technologies that will be used to tackle them. There's a lot of satisfaction in that.
If you post it, they will read.
As a network engineer / designer specialized in complex WAN environments I see quite a few commenters lamenting that they hit a glass ceiling with regards to salaries at some stage in their careers and then feel 'forced' to move into management. A probably naive sounding question comes to mind: If you earn enough to have a comfortable living, why is there such a drive to always earn more? Doesn't spending normally stay flat or decrease as people get older? i.e. student loans, houses and cars paid off, children out of the house/earning their own money etc. I am soon 40 years old, without children and never had significant loans - didn't go to university (self taught), never bought a house - (I didn't want to get tied down by location/or by debt/loans). I worked and lived so far in three different countries and continue to see my choice of profession also as a choice of life-long learning. Some of the best engineers I had the fortune to work with are now retiring happy, healthy and financially secure after spending their whole career in engineering (and avoided getting into management like the plague). Back to my question: Where does the need to continuously increase your salary throughout your career come from?
I am an old guy who has not stayed at any one company for a long time... And I am in demand. Consulting with a lot of experience is a blast! The key is having needed skills that make you worth it.
LOL. Never used BBSes, USENET, IRC, etc.? Flame wars abounded eve 20 years ago.
It's a mixed bag, salaries tend to be a bit lighter, but you get an honest to goodness pension.
There are a lot of public employees in Detroit, Michigan who believed that too. Hell, it was in their State Consitution that their pension promises must be 'honest'.
Unless you work for the Federal government, public employees need to factor in the possibility that the government employing them might go bankrupt and their promised pension be severely cut by a bankruptcy court. Public employees don't even have the protection of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation...
Most of the advice is around programming and repair of hardware systems. But there is a world of managerial expertise in older folks, and this is usually sorely lacking in many IT managers. Corporations are not machines, and people skills are vital to keeping IT central to the organization's goals and practices. The reason organizations have local IT departments (shadow IT) is due to the lack of response from senior IT managers, often at the "C" level. IT management is not accounting, or keeping things cheap,or clever programming, or configuring routers correctly. It requires an understanding of how the business makes money, what its money-making employees want to do, and how best IT can support and enhance these business goals. An older IT manager with solid business background can not only improve the company's profitability and market responsiveness, but also create a more creative and productive job environment for the technical folks.
Oh, by the way, I got into IT at 52.
As a middle aged coder with many years of experience under his belt, I can make the following generalizations based on my experiences:
The first five years after college are the hardest, many people only want to hire coders with experience. If this is where you are now, stick to it if you love it and things will work out. If you are a 'casual coder' who got into the field because you think that its easy money, quit now.
As the years pass, I am finding no end of people who want to hire senior coders that can work 'full stack' and can manage projects and small teams independently. The money is quite good, and the work almost comes to find you. You have to be willing to work to keep up with tech and keep your skills sharp. The only managers that are making twice what I make are going to be c-level, so I if you want to jump ship to management for better money you had better be really good at it. I can promise you these people are not doing half the work I do though. Pay is usually equitable to responsibility, and they have their fair share of that.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Before I retired due to disability, I found that travel was critical to stay employed. The odds of finding suitable employment locally became slimmer and slimmer as I became more experience, so I found myself moving from job to job or spending a lot of time on the road travelling to work sites for 10 days on/4 days off contracts.
You can't really blame the industry; the best money and most interesting jobs have always been short-term "drop kick" contracts to address specific needs with specialized skills. Had I stuck with "regular" programming jobs, I'd have been bored out of my skull.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But what does all that have to do with my main points, which is that a sudden catastrophic change in your health can take it all away, and that becomes more and more likely as you age, and that employers can do the math?
The net result is, as you age, you're more and more likely to either end up with a career-limiting (and I mean limiting in the sense of not many options) event, or to be seen as too much of a potential health risk.
How are you going to be called in as a consultant if you can no longer read for a year or three while the doctors do their magic (me)? Or if you end up permanently in a wheelchair with only one arm and leg working (a relative)? Or you suddenly have to be available 24/7 for a husband who has dementia at 50 and can no longer be left alone (a neighbor)?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I developed for years, moved into software architecture / lead engineer roles, and then, some years ago, noticed that - although my experience increased and increased - I got "stuck" at a certain employment and salary level. I did not want to make the jump into management for the life of me, so I established myself as an independent software architect. msobkow, above, points out that willingness to travel is of paramount importance to stay in the business, and I absolutely second that. I have gigs all over Europe ( am writing this post right now from a Berlin hotel, on a Sunday evening, in order to be at my customer's tomorrow morning ) - and I never, ever enjoyed work as much as since I became independent. It even does not feel like work anymore: I have made my hobby out of my work, so to say. I simply advertise myself as the "programming and software architecture guy who deals with the hard problems the young guys are afraid of". It works. Yes, I stay informed of new developments in my field, learned a new language ( Julia ), am learning a new language right now ( K ). For sure, there is a future in non-managerial IT. You just need to set a sensible course, be flexisble enough to seize opportunities, and off you go. I plan to work way beyond 65, for sheer pleasure, and you'll have to pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
My point was that a catastrophic health event can take it all away, and that has NOTHING to do with participation in marathon coding sessions by "getting into the zone" or work/life balance.
Unpredictable things happen. You can lose it all in one day, or find out you're soon going to in one doctor's visit, without doing anything "wrong" to contribute to it. It could be from bad genes ("You should have chosen better parents!") or just random chance ("You should have known that car was going to burn the yellow light!"). The thing is, it's not always your fault. As programmers, we live in a world that's predictable and replicable. Set of instructions A produces effect B. Life isn't nearly as neat.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I appreciate that someone threw this topic up. I'm in my 30s and for some reason seem to keep getting stuck in the computer maintenance jobs. Because of being busy all the time, I've only recently had the time to be able to pursue other certifications and currently going for the CCENT and plan on pushing for more of a networking role.
I don't know what to think about the younger generation, but I've been wondering about all these companies of 20s somethings that started big companies about 15 yrs ago. A lot of them would be in their 30s or moving into 30-40 age range..... So say that the younger generation has a poor work ethic and are getting trained at schools which does't provide quality programming or computer skills; Will this mean that the 30-40 something generations will be the most valuable generation?
When you posted about your upcoming dismissal a while ago, I posted that I'd been through a similar thing.
Having read your post, I have to say that this is almost exactly what I went through.
The CEO decided he was paying me too much for being 2IC. $15/hour for 40 hours is too much for being responsible for everything in the station when the manager goes home at 6pm.
He stopped paying me after an 8 hour day, in his mind, and handed me a warning for taking breaks. This mean he was paying me for an 8 hour day but was getting a 9 hour day.
Once you realise that, in spite of the pay limitations, I was working up to 13 hours a day 5 days a week, and worked an extra 2-3 most weekends. Add in an extra hour per day at home on my computer - because, in spite of what he told me, 10 years old computers do not compress video at a particularly high speed.
I was waking up four or five times a night from nightmares about work. I'd get up at 3am and drive in to check I'd done stuff.
It's not worth it.
Move on. Get another job, if you can. If you're aware of something illegal going on, dob them in.
I'm looking for another job right now, after 18 months of wage theft. I'm hoping to find something soon.
US Department of Defense. Before everyone tosses the healthcare.gov example as typical government failure, my experience as a DoD IT worker for the past 27+ years does not support that example. I currently work with a top tier group of virtualization engineers, any of which a corporation or startup would be fortunate to have on their payroll.
For context, I just replied to him in this thread.
Now, let me say this to you:
sometimes the lack of planning is deliberate, intended to make you look bad so you can be dismissed.
It happened to me, after I worked 130 hours of overtime in a few weeks. The overtime was my fault for bad planning (even though my equipment was way out of date - imagine trying to win the Indy 500 next year in a street car from the 1930s, then being blamed for not coming in three hours ahead of everyone else).
Mind you, the guy who fucked me over is going to be angry as all hell when I ask him for my 130 hours of time-in-lieu.
Yeah, really. I was in highschool 20 years ago and had been calling people fucktards on the internet since at least 1992! That fucktard n00b probably doesn't even know what a BBS is either!
Try to get into Cobol programming instead of some short lived language that's modern today and worthless next day , it has kept my family feed for 35 years and demand will be there for a long time !
It's a rare programmer who stays employed in a large company until retirement. Every downsizing cycle, the bean counters chop the older guys who tend to be well paid.
In Canada you generally get one month of severance per year of service, but when you're dumped at 55, the likelihood of finding a permanent full time job that uses your skills is close to zilch; so wrongful dismissal awards for older workers are now hitting 3-5 years. In the US, you're hooped.
From 35 on, you will be more likely to be dumped every year in a large corporation.
A tech guy needs to be a principal in a small place and I would recommend keeping a bunch of stuff in your head so that it's going to be really miserable to sustain whatever you're looking after.
I was asked to explain my weekly database update from a supplied feed that went totally over the head of the nonprogrammer who was supposed to be my backup. You could run the script, but the exceptions had to get fixed. The customer database was no longer updated with new, removed and redeployed machines and the customer support system inexorably drifted farther and farther out of reality.
I don't think being in your 30's is a death sentence as a SysAdmin. Especially in small to mid-sized environments. Keeps consulting costs down and overnight miracles can be performed in regard to legacy systems which would leave a lot of the younger folks clueless. And a lot of us are old enough we can even break out a soldering iron if we have to and not burn the building down. It's vendors convincing business owners that dropping everything in the cloud and letting us slide into being irrelevant phone jockeys calling in tickets that threatens our existence.
If you saved properly you wouldn't need to work after 35. Just move to a country where living is cheaper, invest your money in property and live off rent.
I worked as a high level IT engineer for several large enterprises. At the last one we got outsourced to Perot Systems. I managed a team but I still worked on all the hard stuff. I left and went to work for a local small consulting firm, and after a year or two there I started my own.
11 years later and I'm burned out. I want to sell the business. We just sold our house and moved on to a sailboat and plan on cruising for a while, and I'm torn if I want to try and run the business remotely or find somebody to buy it, which isn't easy either.
My experience as well. I have become a bit of a utility infielder, moving from coding to architecture to proposals to coding. If you have a passion for software, age and experience become an asset.
Just posting to remove the accidentally incorrect moderation I made in this thread.
20 years ago was 1994, the very beginning of the dot com boom. You're seriously suggesting nothing has changed in computers since then? I'm wondering how you're on Slashdot having been computer abstinent since the Intel 386 days.
It's called discrimination. I mean seriously, you really think sitting down on your ass coding is really hard work, hard on the body and mind, compared to construction, carpentry, auto mechanic, or any other type of manual labor jobs? please!
Retirement age is 67, so what the fuck are people with IT skills, wasted 4 years of college, wasted thousands of dollars for their diplomas, who still enjoy their jobs, supposed to do from 35-38 years of age until retirement? How much money can you really make in total from 22(college degree) years of age until 35 - 38 to support yourself or your family if you can't find a fucking job? 300k, 600k, 1.2Million? what?
I swear this damn fucking country(run by corporations and the rest of the oligarchy shit heads) and the way it treats it's citizens will never fucking end. Wait for 2 more decades and you will have people who are exactly 30(because it's too old) years of age being pushed into management or out of the tech industry.
I started as an IT professional while in college (actually ended up not getting my degree because I went to a school I couldn't afford, and rather than take loans that would put me in debt, I put off finishing and never got back to it).
After about 15 years in IT, I switched to technical training, and passed on my knowledge. From there, I went into program management (in training programs) and worked with the technical side of the house to solve business problems - not really "management" per se (I didn't have direct reports), but I was directing some technology strategy.
After a corporate acquisition that resulted in my being laid off (because of cost, not because of achievements - they didn't even look at achievements when deciding who to lay off - they just started with the most expensive staff and worked down until costs were cut far enough - their loss), I spent about 3 years as a freelance technical writer, and landed with an outstanding company as a technical writer. Being a good technical writer requires IT chops, and I find the engineers really respect my opinions on things because I'll actually sit down and install the product to figure out how it works, and then document it. If questions come up from our QA team about a feature, I can tell them "if I were implementing this feature, here's what I'd consider important, and here's what I wouldn't" - which has helped them test the product more effectively.
Technology touches us all in different parts of our lives, and staying in IT for a long time (including being on call) can be absolutely draining. Remember that your technical background applies in other areas - such as applying technology to business problems from the business side of things, technical writing, and lots of other areas - and look for opportunities that are tangential to IT work.
I may as well pre-emptively tag this as flamebait, but I will throw out some honest dissent to the idea of (old) age discrimination being as overwhelming as it's portrayed.
I've been in software for 17 years and I have not personally witnessed a single incident of it - not even if I put on my easily-offended hat and really stretch for something that could be interpreted that way. Not a comment during a candidate review, not even an offhand water-cooler crack about "old folks" or whatever. That's obviously not because we engineers are angels - I have heard many, many inappropriate things. But *zero* were ever about being too old, nor have I ever seen any unstated pattern were older engineers were tarred as "not a culture fit." The reverse is not true - it is so common to reject inexperienced candidates that many feel comfortable saying someone is "too young" completely out in the open.
So, where is all of the anti-gray sentiment that I'm repeatedly told is lurking in my future? 40 is on the horizon and I am only in ever-greater demand as an individual contributor thanks to my full-stack independence and the dramatic vacuum of good engineers. In all hiring processes I've ever seen, we were so desperate for anyone with a hair of common sense and reasonable skills that we would have taken someone with three heads if they could crank out good product.
Any reasonable person would be suspicious, given this experience, that all this talk of age discrimination is less of a real problem than an exercise in trying to blame others for letting one's skills fall out of date and becoming un-hireable. True, a young engineer will never get rejected for knowing only COBOL - but there's no excuse for a graying one to have that problem either. If anything, good older engineers should be *more* up-to-date because they can learn new technologies faster (having learned so many before), and are more abreast of useful trends (because their experience lets them discern fads from real evolution).
I feel no pressure to move into management, and plan to code until I am no longer physically able, or financially required, to do so. My advice: double, triple and quadruple down on being the absolute best at what really gets you fired up, and you'll always have a cubicle with your name on it. That's definitely more fulfilling (and often more lucrative) than being a Dilbert-style manager who's only going through the motions.
There are plenty of directions to move other than just "up" (and honestly, I'm not always sure that management is "up").
Are you an in-house programmer now? Move to a company that services clients. Or if you currently provide services to clients, move the other direction.
Currently doing web programming? Move to systems programming, or mobile apps, or something else.
Or move at an angle, to business analysis. Or technical sales. Or new development. Or maintenance. Or a different language/platform.
I've never been in management, but I've always found new challenges and my salary has only gone up. And I'm well on the north side of your 35.
If it makes you happy, do it.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Western US is very Age centric, always has been, probably always will be.. its their Tradition
The Eastern US is more homogenuous, pockets of Ageism, but its not the Tradition
Follows the Windows (off the shelf) versus Linux (off the rack) approach to problem solving
West favors "flash and splash" to East "show me the cash"
There's a reason the West is where most of the Start-Ups begin, and the East buys and then buries them.
The West has access to many young world economies and HB-1 factory workers.. green-handcuffs is not a joke to them, its a bargaining chip
The East more or less has to use more mature workers, though there are pockets that seem to be gentrifying with popularity of alternative operating systems and friendlier tax codes to business.. some Western states may soon shove businesses out the door in the name of green.. and then the Start-ups will leave... tax base will slide.. this has happened before.. it will happen again.. just less available ground water this time.. the great dust bowl of the West will be spectacular.
Cloud businesses aren't really affecting this split in the US.. they are opening up the ability to siphon off everything to other countries with more business friendly tax codes and younger labor forces that sacrifice for cheap wages today and dont think about tomorrow. They are literally aging their workforce with no promise for wages in the future for their countries.. it will hurt when things settle up down the road.
I have been in IT for 17 years now, started at the age of 17, have always had an interest in computers from an early age but of late i have found myself pondering a similar question. I have had an array of jobs from Tech work/Small Business IT/Service Delivery and project managment/IT Operations/Field Services the works but in my years of experience I have found thus far that you can start in Technical and become a manager later but you cannot become a manager and then move into technical, generally doesn't work like that for obvious reasons. The best IT managers are the ones who have a good grounding of IT Technical experience. Most people who move into management have delved into the technical world of IT and feel that they now know enough in their particular field to open up more mature and dynamic challenges to their career. The last statistic on Slashdot I saw about a year ago was that at least 60% of people in IT have business degrees, I think its because IT applies to business in such a big way. When I started in IT most people didnt even have degrees and there weren't many for IT around, so people of my generation have mostly experience, where we are seeing more demand in IT for Uni Qualifications and Side Qualifications like ITIL and Prince2. If you feel upskilling by means of qualifications to be challenging in a practical sense then perhaps managerial positions a better suited for you. I guess you need to ask yourself what it is you want out of IT in the last 10 - 15 years of your career.
My IT career didn't even *start* until I was 32 or 33, it's 20 years later now... and I'm doing just fine, thanks.
But are you a coder or are you a manager? "IT career" can mean many things, including being in management.
Yeah, really. I was in highschool 20 years ago and had been calling people fucktards on the internet since at least 1992! That fucktard n00b probably doesn't even know what a BBS is either!
Thought to myself, "That dude was in high school 20 years ago? Damn he's old."
Then I did the math for myself. Damn I'm old.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
But I do electronic design.
When I was younger this was a huge concern of mine. I have run small engineering departments but that was not my desire.
I like the trenches. I like the nitty-gritty.I like design, not management. And, in the early days of my career, I found myself increasingly pressured into management positions. Thus, I think I have the background to address your concerns.
I fought it. I continually resisted the move into management. Sometimes that required leaving one company to move to another that needed my technical skills rather than my management skills - no matter what anybody says, management skills are rather more common. Moving wasn't a down-side however - staying in one place is almost certainly gonna leave you on the low end of the salary curve,
I even did a stint for 8 years in my own consulting business. One of my most memorable jobs was one that I was originally turned down for. They complained about my rates and hired two kids right out of college for less than they would have paid me. One year later they called me in to fix the product debacle they had produced. I doubled my rate and they were happy to pay it. I don't think that was unfair - fixing somebody else's f*ckups is always harder than fixing your own f*ckups :)
Oddly enough, the job I have now and will probably retire from hired me because of my age. In electronic hardware design, anyway, it seems that the company was having trouble finding people who could actually design with discrete components.Colleges aren't teaching that anymore. Frankly, what are colleges teaching? I am an electrical engineer. One of of the jobs I held involved writing technical manuals (sigh, it was right after on-my-own consulting gig - I got tired of "feast or famine"). While researching a new manual, I was talking to a mechanical engineer who was having trouble with the design of a new system. It was a simple (seemed to me) problem in static forces which I had one class on 25 years previously in college. After I helped him setup the problem (as professors say, the math is left up to the reader) he admitted that the school he graduated from was more interested in teaching them how to design web pages than how to do engineering!
When the fact that I could do low level component design (I refuse to call it "archaic"!) was added to the fact that I kept current, with a background in microprocessor and firmware design as well, I find myself to be the only survivor of a 25 engineer department when the 2008 recession hit.
So, to make a long story short (too late, I know) pursue what you want to do! Ignore those idiots in the wings who know nothing about what you actually do. Don't be afraid to hop jobs if you have to - someone out there wants your technical talents enough to resist forcing you into management. Find them and ignore the rest. At the age of 62 I am still doing state-of-the-art technical design (whatever that means - it looks a lot like electronic design before - I am sure you can draw parallels from your own field) at 62 and I don't expect to stop before I die!
XDDD
IT after 35 is IT
My advice is to avoid large companies. Smaller companies will appreciate you more.
IT isn't a career, it's an abusive puppy mill.
STEM is for suckers, unless you have an entrepreneurial bent and can exploit the herd.
Get out. Go into finance. Do anything else.
I was a IT, software developer guy. I saw the light and bailed. I'm 38 and am on track to a retirement at 45 through the miracle of discovering finance. Get your affairs in order, get some capital, then do what you love. If you're clever, you'll do such a good job that your offspring won't ever have to worry either.
Honestly don't know why this is downvoted; there is a lot of truth to what he says. I've seen it with my own eyes and experienced it.
Silicon Valley has been, since the mid 90s an echo chamber. It's only getting worse. I remember when IT meant you actually knew stuff. These days, it's who you know or where you went to school.
I miss the old days when IT workers were much fewer in number, when it was considered a dark art by most people. I've been in IT now for three decades and I've seen it all. All of these startups do what? What do 95% of so-called "IT companies" do or make? Nothing. Yet they are valued at billions. This will all collapse one day and it cannot happen soon enough. Whatsapp for billions? Funny. It's fracking worthless. Maybe a couple hundred thousand for the R&D and the IP. Other than that... nada.
Remember real software like UNIX? Netware? The Internet is still largely run on UNX and/or UNIX-like platfoms like Linux.
The future of tech is unpredictable. Save up an emergency stash of funds just in case, especially if you are a parent.
For example, if somebody invents a GUI standard that displaces the messy convoluted HTML-based stack currently used for UI's, then programming could be greatly simplified and demand could stall for a good while.
Ya never know.
Table-ized A.I.
I work in a team of about a dozen developers working on a high profile mobile app. One of my coworkers is just out of college. Another one is living in a senior community. Both are high regarded. I am 40 and have no intention to change what I am doing till I am dead. I have no idea why someone would love working in a field less just because of age. There are pluses of young age like higher brain agility and ability to work for long ours, and pluses of older age like judgement and depth of experience. Focus on following your passion and don't worry about age.
Sounds to me like you work for a VERY shitty company.
sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day is the worst thing you could probably do to your health. A carpenter's life expectancy exceeds that of a software engineers, even though the carpenter has to be on his feet all day inhaling sawdust. While the software engineer only has to sit in an air conditioned office inhaling black mold all day.
If you could some how have a split where 20% of the time you worked construction and 80% you worked at a high paying tech job, that would probably by the right balance for most individuals.
I'm a software engineer today, but when I worked on construction as a young man some days of hard work were more satisfying even though the pay really kind of sucked. I was tired as hell 5 days a week, but by Monday morning I was feeling pretty good. Since my construction job (and later an industrial factory job) was a proper 9-5 job with weekends off, I had some real time to recover and relax.
Now I sit at my desk until 8pm on most Friday nights, stressing out about bullshit that matters to my project manager but not to really anyone else in the world. I have phone conferences twice a week at 9pm, with people I can barely hear or understand, and I strain to make sense of what the hell I am agreeing to.
The guy in the next cube, nice guy, is 20 years old than me and has been at the same job in this company for 15 years longer than me. He typically shows up before I do, and often he's still there when I leave. He's somehow managed to suck it up and do this job, while I wish I could figure out how to quit and go back into construction.
Maybe you and I don't have the same fortitude when it comes to accepting abuse?
"Work for a medium sized established company, not a startup run by kids."
... and now at fifty nine I'm back cutting code. I prefer it, and I'm better at it.
Management suits some people, but the problem with our business culture is that if someone is really good in a technical area they get promoted into management, which means you lose your best technical people and gain a lot of second-rate managers.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Why is 30 the new 50? Because your colleagues who are now managers, say so.
They are climbing the career ladder and a component of their success is making the business profitable. You don't do that by hiring 30-somethings who know what they're worth. You do it by hiring new grads who are only too happy to be employed, regardless how little they are paid.
So talk to your peers.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I'm wondering how you can be on Slashdot having no reading comprehension skills....oh wait, nevermind.
I am 49, and doing Hadoop/Big Data administration.
I tried the Manager/Supervisor route and it wasnt for me (about 10 years ago).
Its all about your skills, dedication, and most importantly, how well you work with others.
I'm in my forties and I have found over the years there is no technical career path at most companies for a programmer/software engineer/developer as a perm employee past the senior or lead software engineer/developer position, except for a few architect positions that seem to be difficult to get.
Everything else above the senior developer level seems to be project manager, director, or CIO positions where there is a lot more management/meetings and it is much less technical.
So, I would say consider setting up your own company and doing independent consulting. That way you can just help companies out when they need it and continue to stay on the technical side of things. Depending on what your skills are, your rate as an independent consultant will probably exceed what you would make going into management anyway.
I've been doing nothing but contracts for almost 4 years now and almost every week a recruiter or someone is asking me if I'm available for a contract. I haven't noticed any age discrimination yet. I've seen guys in their 70's still working contracts along with me and doing fine. I think the key to keep going is "attitude" and the willingness to learn new things. As long as you keep that, I wouldn't worry. It might also help that as a contractor, I carry my own insurance for health and disability, so whatever company hires me for gig doesn't have to worry about the higher health/disability premiums I might have if they hired me as an employee.
.. but 'skills discrimination' is. When I left my last job as a Java programmer, I discovered that although I was a pretty darn good developer, because I didn't have exposure to common tools and frameworks (Bamboo, Maven, Swing), it limited who was interested in me. I did get a job, but it was through contacts, which tends to limit possibilities. (Interestingly, I did get a call from Disney because of my experience in other areas, but I wasn't interested in what they offered.)
I think as long as one stays up-to-date and gets exposed to newer things, there isn't any issue with staying in the non-managerial lane. It limits your income, unless you are really good, but I make a very comfortable salary at 55. The companies I spoke with a couple of years ago didn't seem to want experts in the things they were looking for, just someone who didn't need to be trained on everything *except* Java. (Worked for a very small company prior, didn't need any tools to write the POJOs that we used)
I have noticed that I get paid a little bit more because of my leadership abilities. It's not just managers that need to lead, team leads and Sr. engineers need to be seen as leaders also. I just swapped roles at the company I am with, and one of the things that the VP liked about me was my leadership skills. The new role is as Enterprise Software Engineer, and I need to be able to work with small teams to get projects done.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Call a few status meetings to review the status of your status meeting meeting meeting status review meetings. Metrics my boy! Metrics metrics metrics metrics.
48 here. Been coding since I was 12. Been doing it professionally since I was 18. On my team, I'm one of the younger coders. The folks who work nearest me are 51, 52, 49, and 55... There are young-uns on my team and my managers range from late 30's to early 50's in age. I ran my own company at one point, had up to 12 employees. That's where I learned that management was not my thing. I'm not a people person, I don't enjoy it, and as a result, I sucked at it. The company wasn't doing well so I shut it down and went back to working for others. The stress relief was amazing. Now I waltz in at a time that's convenient for me, and leave when I feel like it or when the work is done, depending on the current deadline. I bill for the hours I work. Annually, I get paid more than any of my managers do and I work fewer hours. They're not eligible for overtime but expectations are higher on them. As an old guy with tons of experience, I don't have to take every task they offer me. I make suggestions for things that need to be rewritten and get support for doing it. I have a fairly steady stream of solicitation from other sources so I grant myself some leeway. My current customer has had me for almost 10 years so I'm fairly certain they like what I do. Don't get me wrong, I do work hard and there are things I do that no one else on the team can do (though it'd be easy to hire someone else if they wanted).
I stay current by contributing to one or two open source projects here and there. I also hack on my own personal projects learning new skills in the process. My mind isn't what it used to be. I don't find myself 'in the zone' as often and I find that I have to force the code out of me more often. I keep wondering when someone in management is going to realize that I'm just not as smart as they think I am, but then I seem to consistently pull off something amazing and everyone's happy.
There are younger folks on my team who do some amazing things that I can't do and there are younger folks on my team who are largely useless...
I like this place in my life. I realize I'm one catastrophic medical event away from unemployment and have been saving accordingly. If necessary, I could stop working any time, simplify, and live on a fairly meager but manageable income. If I can hold it together for 7 or 8 more years, I can retire in relative comfort.
Well ok, there is still a lot of people in the industry that steps back when they see someone who's 60 claiming they can code, regardless of actual coding abilities (one of the best engineer I know is 68~ by now...)
But if we're talking about the 30-50, the discrimination is only indirectly age related.
We haven't been writing software for thousands of years like we've been building houses, so a lot of stuff is up for debate. Its a growing industry, so there's, almost by definition, more young people than old one in it. More or less anything not core-science (and even then) the young programmers in school are being taught is bullshit. Now, you have slightly older programmers, who have been around, made the mistakes, and are trying to tell the younger ones their preconceptions are wrong. You need to seriously know your shit, back it up, and make your arguments. If you can't, you're told good bye as the weakest link who doesn't "get it".
A lot of older devs also don't keep up to date. So the little youngling who just learnt the new shiny thing will be seen as ahead. Even if you think node.js/rails/scala/whatever is stupid (or not), you need to know at least enough to hold a conversation or make an argument as to why you think so. If you're in an interview, someone mentions new technology XYZ (let say, web components), and you tell them "Well, I think web components are stupid, so I haven't really played with them", that makes for a very weak argument, and you're out.
So its all about keeping up to date, having relevant experience, and knowing your stuff to be able to back it up. I recently was on the job market (and I'm in my 30s...I also kind of like round B startups, so I interviewed for a bunch of those). A lot of the interviews ended up in debates with younger devs. I still got offers at all of them (and there was a lot of them...). You could tell at first the 20somethings that talked to me thought i was crazy on a bunch of things. You just have to be able to explain it.
Rereading this post though, I wish I could explain this point just as well :)
I love and hate being the "Go To" guy. I often describe the reason you become one as NDA disorder. If you are "Not a Dumb Ass" and can actually do stuff soon you will find yourself doing a ridiculous amount of work. I have never understood how people can avoid work by claiming to be too stupid to do it but I have seen it many times.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Ever met an old coder.. who went on and on about the merits of Cold Fusion. And I am not talking about nuclear power.
I am 53 year-old. I started my career long before iPod/iPad/iFad, actually even before the IBM PC was introduced. During my career I tool extra care not to move into middle management for the following reasons:
I enjoy developing stuff. Management (for me) is boring.
I would rather be a good and solid developer than an average or sub-par manager.
I find that middle management is way more risky career-wise than being a developer. It is simple math:
For every 3-4 developers there is only one team lead, and for every (9-16 developers) 3-4 team leads there is only one group manager.
But there is one BIG caveat:
Managerial/people skills usually get better as you grow older and your life experience accumulates. You have better understanding of what motivates people, the what and how make them "tick".
However, in the development-level time is your enemy. Your technical skills rot and become unmarketable quickly, sometime within a time-frame of 12-24 months. So you as Alice in Wonderland, you need to keep running just to stay in one place.
If you have the energy and the curiosity to do it, then my recommendation is: Go for it.
I am running my own business these days. but several years ago (2008-2012) I was working for an Israeli start up and was enjoying myself. They appreciated the life-long experience gained during dozens if not hundreds of software projects big and small.
History does repeat itself sometime while developing S/W: the specs are never water-tight, features keep creeping, customers change their mind mid-flight, severs crash in the least opportune moment. It happened in 1985, in 1995, in 2005, and will happen in 2015, and in 2025, ...
There is a big difference if this is your first or second big project or if it is your 100th one. You ability to anticipate the problems, and to accept that they will happen is much better.
One last point:
I also found that I had no problem to keep pace with younger colleagues while developing code and usually my code was less buggy and better quality.
Dror
Started in USAF at age 20: spent 3 years QA'ing contractors' code, found Unix (ATT SysV), spent 2 more writing glue programs (BASIC/Pascal/Shell) for management and re-writing contractor's Ada; jumped to sysadmin position, found Perl, found CGI, spent 3 years writing more management glue; left a stripe on the table for private sector, spent 14 years leapfrogging between customer-facing and infrastructure teams, running 10*[1..3] systems and writing Perl/PHP glue; laid off, then picked up by different company, spent 4 years there defending the Internet from DDoS while writing more glue; cut loose, then picked up by govt contractor, who needs more glue.
The key to my longevity is keeping in contact with co-workers who know what you can do, regardless of the specific environment, and learning Perl in 1992 (thx merlyn).
Find out how the company makes money and contribute to it.
Casteism
I was drafted into becoming a coder when the IT department at a huge company failed to come up with a working payroll system in time to pay 500 people. I wrote it in a week.
I've had to learn over 20 languages, from Cobol to Lisp to GPSS to ADA to C. I've worked on operating systems, compilers, real-time systems and IT. Now I'm learning Python, Django and writing an IOS app.
Oh, yeah, I'm 72 years old. No certs - they didn't exist and I never got any. Anyone want to challenge my credentials?
Age discrimination exists, but it depends on the role, the person and how they are perceived. Being over 35 and still working at a junior level in terms of skills is not well received. Having not gotten any new or renewed certifications in the last 12 years doesn't look great. Then look at Fed Chair Janet Yellen, at 68 clearly nobody cared about age. They are happy to have someone with experience. A resume doesn't have your age on it and it can be written to make your age less obvious. Bring energy and enthusiasm to the interview and I really doubt most times your age will really be the deciding factor. The grizzled cynicism that is the badge of honor of veteran IT workers doesn't always sell with the young companies where being positive is considered a job requirement.
Smile or Die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are a lot of public employees in Detroit, Michigan who believed that too. Hell, it was in their State Consitution that their pension promises must be 'honest'.
Thank the Mackinac Institute/ALEC-run government for the final push. Not only did they establish one line of control of Detroit (state takeover that effectively nullified elections), but that they rushed through a bankruptcy filing to gain another. That, and the entities that take over the state call themselves *conservatives* for doing that.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You presume that all should have that ability while not recognizing the good value of those that do not.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Any reasonable person would be suspicious that age discrimination does not exist.
FTFY.
True, a young engineer will never get rejected for knowing only COBOL - but there's no excuse for a graying one to have that problem either. If anything, good older engineers should be *more* up-to-date because they can learn new technologies faster (having learned so many before), and are more abreast of useful trends (because their experience lets them discern fads from real evolution).
Which only justifies a greater push to kill off age discrimination to allow competent people their day. If it really was about competence, a whole lot of problems in finding people would simply not exist (especially with guest workers).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Are you an in-house programmer now? Move to a company that services clients.
Which means that you move to something with the stability of a tsunami-hit nuclear reactor, which is none.
Or if you currently provide services to clients, move the other direction.
The saner move.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You get the rarity of job security with the budget of a large company.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So, I would say consider setting up your own company and doing independent consulting. That way you can just help companies out when they need it and continue to stay on the technical side of things. Depending on what your skills are, your rate as an independent consultant will probably exceed what you would make going into management anyway.
Not only do you get to deal with the increased costs (which claw back any increases), you also have an increased lack of stability for when things go wrong (which they will).
I've been doing nothing but contracts for almost 4 years now and almost every week a recruiter or someone is asking me if I'm available for a contract. I haven't noticed any age discrimination yet. I've seen guys in their 70's still working contracts along with me and doing fine.
You're disposable, so they like you - which is the problem at hand.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am running my own business these days. but several years ago (2008-2012) I was working for an Israeli start up and was enjoying myself. They appreciated the life-long experience gained during dozens if not hundreds of software projects big and small.
Exception case of someone doing well in a unstable environment designed to be bad for most - versus a system of good pay & security that is better for most.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But don't let that stop you. I sucessfully reentered the software dev field after being away for nearly 20 years. I last developed code professionally in 1993, but have since retrained myself and am a successful (and sought after) Android developer. Stay informed, stay current and realize you have talent regardless of age.
I'm a mechanical engineer and I've been doing the 2-3 year circuit of staying at a company long enough to glean the information I need to parley that into something more meaningful somewhere else. I'm 45 and I've been in the industry nearly 25 years and I learn new things all the time, but I do sometimes get the sense that I'm starting to age myself out of the market. Especially considering the level of salary I can command, which is is now and has been in the 6 figures for some time. Do I expect that to decline as I get older, I hope not. Will I be rejected from time to time due to my age I imagine, but overall that doesn't bother me. I'll probably work until I drop dead simply because I enjoy the work that I do. However, given that, with the tech boom in NorCal being what it is, I find it sometimes difficult to deal with the arrogance and hubris that is put on display by the 20 somethings that believe their shit doesn't stink. It's almost a total disregard for respect not only for others, but how they interact with others. It's not demographically wide, but there is almost a built in douche factor after they leave university, hook up with some buddies, come up with a somewhat catchy idea, give it a some kind of cute name they can brand, and carry it forward into trying to make it something meaningful as they burn through gobs of money from investors with little to nothing to show for it. All the while they believe they are being kind socially conscious, but in reality ending up being wage slaves waiting or pretending to exercise their options if they ever nail it big, which for many is a long shot. I go for the sure thing. Pay me and I'll give you my best. I'm not here for the free ride of potential success.
Hello! Welcome to WalMart!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I worked as a developer and solutions architect for about 10 years. I worked under non-technical management for some time and was incredibly frustrated with decisions made on the basis of general management knowledge, rather than an understanding of software development and developers.
As a result, I decided to go into management - how hard could it be? Turns out, quite hard.
There are almost no transferable skills between software development and management, unfortunately.
Also, many of the aspects of software development which bring job satisfaction don't exist in a management role.
Feedback loops move from being very direct and very short - write code, compile, run, result, fix, compile, run - to almost always indirect and almost always long-running - identify what feels like a general issue with training and currency of skills in your team, explore options for training, look into costs for each, present options to team, get no consensus as everyone has a different preference, make decision on which training to use, deal with complaints from those whose preference wasn't selected, training budget is cut, so programme isn't completed, deal with complaints from those who missed out, see some improvement in uptake of new technology by one person in team, that person leaves as they are now in demand in the market...
The built-in belief that the objectively best solution is the one that should be implemented becomes subverted by political, financial and emotional influences. Rather than working in a context where there are an agreed set of terms as to what is "better", you have to negotiate with stakeholders who have more power than you, sacrifice quality to make cost savings and implement stupid features because that's what the client demands.
And of course you stop delivering true value directly yourself. Instead all your work is done through others. How often have you seen a new team lead standing over a developer's shoulder practically telling them which keys to press? Their instinct to get involved directly is so powerful that even when they're team leading, they try to get as close to the keyboard as possible. You need to learn to step back, give clear instructions and then just let the team complete the work in your place.
A transition to management is not easy, nor is it for everyone. If you're going to make the move, you need to be aware of all these issues and the many others which come with any major career shift - because that's exactly what this is.
I started in UNIX 33 years ago and linux 20+ years ago. Apart from a few years in management/marketing where I discovered I really liked engineering, I've been coding (outside the commercial/db/web space) ever since. C C++ bash, python, device drivers, you name it, I do it. Also a lot of cleaning out the dirty stables left by young idiot 'professional' compsci hotshot guys who shot through after dropping their gifts on us.
There were no compsci courses when I studied. I took a BSc in Pure Maths, 2 years as Cobol programmer and an MSc in Engineering - Land Surverying. As a landie I needed to cruch numbers hence Fortran. From there to real-time control, instrumentation, process control etc etc and then to UNIX.
My point is that it was more important to have an engineering background - almost everything engineering needs computers. I think it's probably true today too.
Also, I was lucky - I got into UNIX at the right time, and sticking to it hasn't been a bad thing - unlike the poor Novell, dBase or <insert defunct technology> experts. My depth of experience is well valued by my employer and colleagues.
Not pure luck, of course - I've had 5 redundancies in the last 15 years so it hasn't been plain sailing. Finding a new job every 2-3 years in the private sector is not nice. The hiring managers are getting younger and while I've found some who value the older team member the whole interviewing process can be horrible - my hit rate is getting lower and I have to admit you need a lot of grit to get past the idiots. But a thick skin is one thing you acquire over the years.
I retired from the US Navy at age 39 in 2005. I was an Electronic Technician, so I was in a technical field but not IT - I primarily maintained HF/UHF radios and radars. I got my CCNA just before I retired and got a job as a network engineer. That contract lasted until earlier this year. I had no problem finding a job at 49 and I'm still getting calls from recruiters. I'm currently working at a NOC and I'm the shift supervisor. In the last position, I moved up to Lead Engineer for the last four years. So you could say I do a bit of low-level management, but I'm not management per se. I'm just supervising entry-level techs and still spend most of my time performing technical duties.
And your resume will go to the top of the stack on first sort for the next 35 years... Why? Because we *KNOW* you can follow directions.
You feel it, you're a much better coder now than when you were in your 20s, and you see the forest too, not just the trees; the full picture. There is demand for people with matured skills.
I always thought "the man" was too busy keeping people down and making sure that other people can't better themselves to do all that you propose.
that's the boss' job - to make himself indespensible and remind everyone else that they're entirely expendable.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
hell, we used to promise our customers impossible things JUST to stir the pot, especially if they where overseas and were confusing anyway.
"What do you want to do?" "retire early like all our former CEO's?"