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Do Old Programmers Need To Keep Leaping Through New Hoops?
Nerval's Lobster writes: In recent years, it seems as if tech has evolved into an industry that lionizes the young. Despite all the press about 21-year-old rock-star developers and 30-year-old CEOs, though, is there still a significant market for older programmers and developers, especially those with specialized knowledge? The answer is "yes," of course, and sites like Dice suggest that older tech pros should take steps such as setting up social media accounts and spending a lot of time on Github if they want to attract interest from companies and recruiters. But do they really need to go through all of that? If you have twenty, thirty, or even forty years of solid tech work under your belt, is it worth jumping through all sorts of new hoops? Or is there a better way to keep working — provided you don't already have a job, that is, or move up to management, or get out of the game entirely in order to try something startling and new.
If you have X years of programming experience, then you should be able to sell yourself based upon that.
Social media and such would be useful to programmers JUST STARTING THEIR CAREERS.
BUT! If you are an older programmer you DO need to keep expanding your knowledge. Learn newer languages / systems.
sites like Dice suggest....: "Do the same thing as the young folks"!!!
a. Hit up social media (really, a lot of folks mislead on social media, it's a freaking ad show, we had this discussion on trust awhile back on /.)
b. Speak up w/the megaphone on github (really, a lot of folks "reinvent the string class" on this site, it's hard to find good code except well establish projects that moved to github, it's a freaking ad show). Github is a love and hate relationship.
Dice conclusion: Sell Sell Sell. That's what the youngins' do. What they're selling is not experience, but what you want to hear, "the potential possibilities". Especially if the company (customer) is a startup, since everyone will be looking for a new job in 6-8 months anyway. Doesn't matter if you're selling fact or fiction, just close the freakin deal! That's the attitude nowadays.
There used to be something call a profession, you gained experience in it and then companies would be able to gauge it and even reach out to you via academic societies, professional registries, tech user groups or even unions. Doesn't exists anymore thanks to HR depts....
Maybe real social lives that take up all of their time.
There has been quite a discussion (including in CIO magazine) about old programmers being exactly the right people to deal with "ancient" legacy systems. There is still a lot of systems in current use written in COBOL out there, even COBOL that predates the ANSI version. FORTRAN is still surprisingly strong in the scientific community.
The article mentions programmers continuing in niches. Me, for example. I've discovered a very nice corner where I work with RS-232 serial ports and the mistakes engineers/programmers 20-30 years my junior inflict on the community. Schools don't teach the National Semiconductor 16550 UART anymore; not to mention all the errors made trying to utilize the FIFO capabilities. (It's not engineers using the chips themselves, it's the ASIC people using the 16550 from the cell libraries!)
I'm on the wrong side of 60, yet I've not decided when I'm going to retire...if I retire. I may just decide that, as long as I can find people who need my skills, I'll keep going until they carry me out feet-first.
I think that it is more about chasing the flavour-of-the-month.
Is it enough to be on AOL?
No? How about MySpace?
Okay, is LiveJournal acceptable then?
And so forth.
If you're looking for YOUNGER programmers then you look for them where YOUNG people hang out.
But don't demand that OLDER programmers try to socialize the way that younger people do.
To be honest, as an "old" programmer, I do not have any trouble keeping up. But I am not special -- anyone who makes the effort can keep up. I think that is the point of the Dice article cited in the post -- you can keep up and it is not that hard to do so. And you can change you job with the times. I have worked in my fundamental area of physics, then process engineering, then metrology, and now programming and communications. For the software portions of my work, since starting in 1969 I have used 8 languages, on 7 operating systems.Toss in a few variations for different frameworks. So long as I can read, I can keep up. As for the "dead at 35" meme expressed in the cited InfoWorld article (which the article author Neil McAllister promptly kicks to the curb), I just say "See here kid, I'll retire when I'm good and ready."
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
"Companies say they can't find enough qualified candidates. "
Law of supply and demand affects salaries. Companies that have not learned this, can't find qualified candidates, because they're not paying enough.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
In recent months, it seems as if Nerval's Lobster has evolved into a submitter that lionizes single-source stories based on Dice advertisements. Despite all the press about Nerval's Lobster only posting Dice stories, is there still a significant market for older submitters, especially those who post actual news stories? The answer is "yes," of course, and sites like the comments section of Slashdot suggest that Nerval's Lobster should take steps such as posting something that isn't a single-source story from Dice and spending a lot of time on submitting actual quality stories if they want to not be mocked by commenters. But do they really need to go through all of that? If you have twenty, thirty, or even forty years of Dice link submissions, is it worth jumping through all sorts of new hoops? Or is there a better way to keep working — provided you don't already have a way to bypass the editorial system, that is, or move up to management, or just keep posting Dice links?
The last time I jumped through a new hoop, I broke my hip.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Thats basically it. If you're a new dev out of school, you're learning all the new stuff.
If you're an older dev, you can either learn new stuff, or stick with the old. If you don't know the new stuff, you're obsolete. If you learn the new stuff, AND know the old, you're among the most valuable person in the industry and will be getting harassed by people trying to hire you continually.
Software Engineers can make enough money to stick in the top 3-5% of earners. You don't get that much by doing a 9-5 job where you don't need to learn new stuff.
Yes, you should stay current. That doesn't necessarily mean GitHub, but you should at least have a pretty good idea of what GitHub is, what it does and how to use it.
Here's the thing. If you want to get a programming job today, chances are you'll need to pass through some kind of "white board" programming test. That is, a 1-3 hour session where the hiring manager and team will sit you down and ask you to come up with code and architecture to solve a real world problem. That means that you'll need to be able to think on your feet. It can be a terrifying, humbling experience if you are not prepared for it or even if you are. So, the best thing you can do is be prepared.
If you're selling yourself as a Java developer, you had damned well know Java inside out. Yeah, that means crack open a recent website and read up not just on all the fundamentals you've forgotten but also read up on some of the newer stuff that Java's added in the last few years. Walk through some sample interview questions on the web.
Secondly, work on your people skills. You'll have to be able to explain yourself clearly and concisely. You can be a brilliant technical person but if you cannot be understood, you won't get the job. During the white board session, people aren't looking for perfect syntax. What they are looking for is how you approach a problem, how you break it down, and how you communicate your path through the problem. Again, this all comes down to good communication skills as much as how well you sling code.
For the record: I'm a 53 year old programmer. I just "retired" from one company and landed in another with a 20% pay raise and better opportunities to move upwards. And yeah, I did have to pass a grueling 3 hour "white board" test. It can be done.
Jesus wept.
It's not what's "hard" about it. The problem is that you have to live with yourself afterwards, with a bunch of strangers sending you highly-refined stupidity and looking for "follow-backs" and "likes" and "favorites". People posting pictures of their goddamn dinner. Then there are the bots dressed up as humans. Saying stupid cut and paste friendliness, but you don't want to block them because it just doesn't feel right and then it'll bring down the number of accounts that follow you to single digits.
For me, social media always brings to mind the quote by the poet Charles Bukowski:
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem is that the HR departments want X years in specific technology.
You still go through HR for jobs?
That's so darn cute!
Yet -- the programmers I know are all over 40 and can code rings around anyone at any Silicon Valley company. Literally. They don't desire fame, fortune, or limelight. These guys work for the likes of IBM, Cray, old-school companies. You will never hear their names or read about them in print. However, they code for the most stable platforms this earth has ever seen.
One old guy I studied under could pull strings of code from his memory that literally astounded me. He was "retired" at 50 because he didn't fit in. I was about 30 at the time. When he left, the department went to hell inside of six months. I left shortly thereafter. It was begrudgingly admitted by the younger "leadership" that Dan really did know what he was doing and that perhaps the younger programmers could have learned a thing or two. To this day, I still use skills and techniques Dan taught me. He was older, and old school. He was pedantic, well read, knew programming pitfalls, could see mistakes coming, could tell if a compiler would have issues with code, could debug better than anyone I've know before or since. This guy could spot errors in code like they were highlighted. He was uncanny. I'm still somewhat bitter they let him go. I heard rumours, but never confirmed that the younger team leads felt threatened by him. Good for them. He was worth at least 10 of them and had the knowledge of at least that many. Where did this guy go to college? He didn't. I think this pissed off more people than the fact he was a quiet rockstar in his own right.
21-year-old rock-star developers
Burn out by 30 by the grace of corporations that bleed them dry and recreational narcotics that render them fast but futile for learning anything beyond ruby. the rockstars are great, until you put them in front of project managers, change management boards, and sysops with more than a decade of experience. At that point, its shreiking autism barfing buzzwords and pulling six figures.
30-year-old CEOs
do not a company make. a 30something CEO is about as stable as exchange on windows NT. As a corporation at best you have bragging rights to a token with an idea. At worst you have a neurotic powdekeg with no formal indoctrination in business at all. The best they can do is show up missing on a hike through the himalayas or some skydiving team building synergy pumping cockthirsty vacation in the third world. At worst, they leave your business without a continuity plan after insulting an ISIS warlord on the Syrian border when explaining their love of dubstep.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you want a mobile client to send 180 character messages out to millions of people, hire a young programmer,
If you want your networks to support messages going out to millions of people, all the time, every time, hire an old programmer.
If you want a really cool interactive website where employees can manage the benefits and see how much is in their 401k, hire a young programmer.
If you want your payroll to run and people to be paid accurately, every time, all the time, hire an old programmer.
If you want a fancy game, hire a young programmer.
If you want a system to manage the business that sells the game, hire an old programmer.
If you want an employee that sees stuff as fun toys and re-invents the wheel at every chance, hire a young programmer.
If you want an employee who understands that this is a business and that people's livelihoods depends on it being right, all of the time, hire an old programmer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Old programmers don't have to work. We're "consultants", sitting on the beach, collecting big fat fees for making the occasional modification to legacy code written in some obscure language. The best is, har har, when they hire us to document the code....we throw in so much bullshit into the docs that only a brother in our secret order can decode it. Do you remember Y2K? Yeah, that was us! The year 2038 problem is also going to be a big money-maker, even moreso than the pile of IPv4 space we're sitting on. Of course, it doesn't work out as well for all who enter the field. I see some old VMS programmers begging for beer money and looking for scraps of VT102's in Maynard...tough for them. Others have moved on to new careers, such as real estate agents, journalists, or porn stars, I know one feller that leveraged his way into being a big-city bus-driver, and pulls in just as much doing that as he did slinging bits at Wang, but for a lot less effort.
For almost 14 years, there has been a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court who used to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While heading the EEOC he held up some 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits expired.
Yet there are ways to hide your age until you actually sign-on as an employee. Never discuss any part of your career that ended more than 10 years ago. Touch up your gray hair; Clairol (or some other brand) is your friend. Men should touch up their mustaches and beards, too. (But DO NOT resort to comb-overs, toupees, or other ways to hide your baldness.) You can readily claim your college degrees, but do not mention when you earned them.
Another area for caution is your salary history. Avoid discussing this. Take the position that you prefer to consider total compensation, including fringe benefits. Also indicate that past compensation might have been earned for an effort different from the one you are being considered. If you need the job and are willing to work for less than you used to make, do not allow your prospective employer use your past salary to disqualify you.
Also, remember that old dogs do indeed learn new tricks. If you are experienced in three computer languages and three operating systems, the next one will be very easy to learn. In any case, the old tricks are sometimes very valuable.
See my http://www.rossde.com/unemploy.... This might be somewhat dated, but the overall content could prove useful.
I am 67 years old, I have more than 45 years experince. My first "personal computer" was an IBM 360/20 with four keypunch machines.
I have a web site (www.andycanfield.com). This year I learned Facebook (bad user interface, dumb pictures). Two months ago I had a stroke, so I'm typing this using 'onboard', which I learned YESTERDAY.
My career path for the past 25 years was learned from the best Patpong hookers: "Find somebody who's got money, and keep him happy. The money will take care of itself."
The company is still making money running software I wrote 20 years ago, and they know it. This week they want a new feature - of course I agreed. I support their servers weekly through my home Internet connection. I live in the town where they asked me to live 20 years ago.
My wife I picked out myself.
I recall getting a task and making a new module fulfilling it. Most of the time I spent on making it simple. I checked a half a year after release and to my surprise my code was full of patches - I look at all the tickets (these were old times where if you fixed anything then only because it was ordered by an architect or trough maintenance channels. All tickets but one were done in my module because it apparently was simpler to do. These also were times when design centers were paying fines to HQ for too high fault quotes which explained actually all of the tickets then. This was when I was young. I am an old fart and:
I know very few guys as old as me who did not leave hoops - they are minority. The rest of surviving 50+yo guys go as far as refusing to cooperate with 'youngsters' like me or producing incomplete documentation (if any is produced at all). The resulting mess can be made working on customer premises in an emergency after weekend of well paid time in a hotel, by heroes and only by them. I did not believe any sane corporate management would allow it but in fact they appreciate it - all they have to say is this "I hired this guy who saved our arses so many times!" They do not of course mention that a simple industrialized fix could be cheaper. Why should they....I was fighting it for years until I understood. You just have to learn stop worrying and love the bomb.
Leaping through new hoops? No. Looping through new heaps, on the other hand...
This is tough, but you need to hear it... It's not the industry. It's you.
You didn't lose an IT career, because you never had one. By your own description, you don't have control over the technologies that you've tried to use. I also notice that you didn't mention any business domain knowledge.
I could sugar-coat this and tell you that it isn't fair, but this really how economies have always worked. If you want a job, you have to bring something of value to the relationship. It is not up to potential employers to train you so that you can take their money. Face the fact that with less than 3 years of experience, no evident business focus, and weak technical skills, you rate as entry level at best.
Figure out what you want to do, learn how to do it, and find opportunities to use your actual skills. You may need to make tradeoffs and compromises along the way, so think about your choices carefully.Getting started is tough--I've done it more than once--but putting it off just makes it harder.
Last, if I was interviewing you, and you blamed your lack of success on the ethnicity of your co-workers, I would end the interview and not call you back.
I know it is hard to hear criticism, but I hope it helps. All the best in your search.
It's not who you know that will necessarily get you a new job.
It's both plus having the ability to communicate in a reasonable manner.
When you are "experienced" and have quite a few years of development behind you, a decent developer will have built up a list of friends from previous or current jobs. Hopefully, these friends respect your ability to develop. When it comes time to obtain a new job, hitting up those friends is an invaluable resource. I have hired several colleagues from previous encounters in this manner. I have even hired the same guy twice. Each time I moved jobs, I pulled him in behind me. I have also been hired twice thru personal references myself.
Just think about it. Do you think an interview is much more than a crapshoot? You are trying to judge the suitability of a candidate based upon a few hours of interaction. Wouldn't you rather judge someone based upon their past performance of which you (or a friend you trust) are familiar, having previously worked with them?
I'm not saying that an old dog shouldn't learn new tricks. Far from it. It's every developer's responsibility to maintain their skill set. I am extolling the virtues of building a network of past/current colleagues who might be of help to you in the future, just as you might be of help to them.
And if you're a developer that does anything in a non-windows environment, you should have some sort of git account, because you should be using git.
Even if you're a Windows developer, you should have a git account and you should be using git. Even Microsoft are doing development work in the open using GitHub.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
That's motherfucking right. Don't listen to shit like "you must know all the new languages". Really ? What the fuck does any language have that C++ does not. I know Assembler, C, C++ and perl. I dare someone here to tell me that I need a new language. I double dare you! When I go to some interview I make them cry like babies. I was there when there was no Solaris, just SunOS. I started with Solaris 2.3. I wrote my own device drives for Linux Kernel 0.9xxx. Who the fuck will try and make me feel bad about how old I am. I forgotten more than most people know.
Be confident in your knowledge. Do not go the interview feeling sorry for yourself. You have experience, knowledge people skills. Be proud. Never show fear.
Walk in there and whip out your dick. On your dick you have a tattoo of all the Linux kernel versions.
Who gives a flying fuck about Python and PHP and Ruby and Java shit. You know C and C++. Fuck everybody else.
Thank you for listening
Take it from a 50YO programmer, you have to keep learning, or else you end up out on the street looking for jobs. Joke? Even if you do, you are competeing against 20 YOs who have the same amount of experience as you do in the "New" stuff, and companies don't want old folks
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso