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Can Older IT Workers 'Navigate' Ageism? (cio.com)
Slashdot reader snydeq writes, "In an industry that favors youth over experience, the best defense against age discrimination may be avoiding becoming a victim in the first place, writes Bob Violino in a report on your rights and how to deal with ageism in IT." From the article:
That includes being a lifelong learner and staying on top of developments in your field at every stage of your career, and seeking out training at your workplace and on your own. Make sure your employer knows you're willing to undertake training to retain and gain knowledge and skills. It's also important to show current or potential employers that you bring value to the organization through experience and flexibility.
The article suggests bringing any concerns about ageism to your Human Resources department -- and documenting any age-related incidents. But it also quotes a labor attorney who argues "Many employers believe that older workers are reluctant to try new technologies," adding that age discrimination is more prevalent in specific industries including technology. Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off. He also points out that in the U.S. laid-off workers are actually entitled to a list showing the positions and ages of all other affected employees -- which in cases of age discrimination can provide grounds for a class action lawsuit.
The article suggests bringing any concerns about ageism to your Human Resources department -- and documenting any age-related incidents. But it also quotes a labor attorney who argues "Many employers believe that older workers are reluctant to try new technologies," adding that age discrimination is more prevalent in specific industries including technology. Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off. He also points out that in the U.S. laid-off workers are actually entitled to a list showing the positions and ages of all other affected employees -- which in cases of age discrimination can provide grounds for a class action lawsuit.
Ageism is the first step of the screening process to make absolutely certain old people don't make it to the interview and have no opportunity to negotiate.
In an industry that favors cheap over good
Have gnu, will travel.
That is really what it boils down to. If you get better, than when you reach an age where the general stupidity about "youth" being an advantage does not serve to cover incompetence anymore, you will not be incompetent. Not-incompetent IT personnel is in short supply and the "wizards" are universally treasured. Very few are young though, IT is just far too hard to get good at.
If, on the other hand, getting older just makes you more grumpy and you remain just as inexperienced and incompetent as you were as a young person (and we all start understanding pretty little, that is just how it works), then you will just get more expensive and even less useful with age. Unfortunately, the second class of older IT workers is the majority and they are a pain. I have even run into ones that sabotage things in ways that are hard to pin on them in order to make others look bad and I have encountered quite a few of the utter scum where anything broken is always the other's fault, never theirs, regardless of of how bad they have screwed up.
These are also the people that tell you "cannot be done" about a lot of things, when they really just mean "I do not want to do it". The best I had so far was a senior web-server administrator that told me that there was no way to increase logging level in Apache. Fortunately there were others in this call and a simple "adjust the value of LogLevel" made him come back a few minutes later with "ah, yes, that seems to be possible". (By now I ride over these people mercilessly, privilege of being an expensive tech-consultant.) Why this guy was not fired quite a while ago is beyond me. I have run into this numerous times before and almost always with older IT people, because the younger ones still have some appreciation of their limitations.
Bottom line: Do not bet that guy that drags everyone down, advises against all changes, screws up and blames others, etc.
Be the guy (or gal) that has rational and good arguments when advising against changes (which is often necessary, many "new" things are just bad), has a high level of skill, insight and experience, is helpful, and admits that yes, you make mistakes as well, and you do not have any problem with "ageism".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Or, alternatively, you can provide much better value than the young and inexperienced. Then you can ask for a significantly higher salary and more time off.
If you stopped learning at 25, that will not be an option though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sorry, calling BS here. -note: search older posts by subject-
The US and Europe have 2 different mentalities when it comes to aging members of a technology field. So I will just comment on the US. As someone who has reviewed and replaced via outsourcing/onshoring/offshoring as a highly viable tactic, many people over 40, I can tell you my experience.
People over the age of 40 (men and women, tho women are far rarer) who find themselves without a job or forced to change careers tend to be lacking all of the following passions ( I say passion because like any educational investment, it is, fact, move on ).
1. Staying up to date on trending technology (ex. I've let so many ppl go because they refused to follow scrum or learn the basics of a MEAN stack)
2. Staying up to date on proven technology (ex. Just because you learned the new JS framework Angular doesn't mean you can't keep up on VB.Net)
3. Being engaged and promoting ideas, sometimes outside the course of their role/position (ex. staying quiet at round-tables then complaining about the company's path)
4. Showing desire to be promoted or advancing into management ( climbing the ladder ) (ex. leading by example, solving a problem then helping the business or client understand it by translating it from tech to bus and waking them thru it, instead of just fixing it and say, it's fixed)
5. Taking risks and expanding on concepts of independence, taking what is learned or going startup (ex. you been in the health IT dev dept for 5 years and you haven't come up with 1 idea to improve on the system outside of the current version)
6. Consulting, or taking advantage of opportunities that require your skill (ex. you only want to do UI design, so you jump from job to job doing UI)
and
7. A lack of understanding on how to action any of the above or a overall missunderstanding of leapfrogging or just unreasonable, inflexible, headstrong, dyed-in-the-wool or whatever you want to call it, but it's on "you" and not the environment. (ex. the above is what keeps you viable and desirable, because you have to keep that eager young mindset, but you have ALL that years of experience, which make you in-demand)
The promise of higher salaries always comes true...for the Board members
Ask Carly Fiorina.
You mean like how older people don't want to code or design for smart phones and tablets because they are a new thingy?
Like how experienced people used to powerful tools don't want to be stuck with nigh-unusable toys because they're the latest faddish thing. Many many things count for this, like that fractal of bad design, but also anything with "script" in it or the languages pushed by the big "tech" companies that are really battles for mindshare, moreso than attempts at creating a better mousetrap^Wprogramming language.
Of course, those are what you need most to do tablet or smart phone "development", or "modern" webshit anything. It doesn't result in usable things. But boy are they New! and Shiny!
Tech is all about the next new shiny toy. If you stopped caring about the next new shiny toy then you are out of touch with the industry.
Only if you conflate "silly valley" (where this very much is the thing, just like being past 25 is "old" there) with "the tech industry".
And this is a lingering problem that will at some point see the chickens come home to roost. Young people typically lack that perspective, while older people sooner do.
Kill yourself.
Slashdot's universal answer to every problem in society. Too bad that the advice givers don't follow their own advice.
My experience as well.
The longer they are able to stay employed without learning they harder it is on them.
I have had co-workers doing the same tasks more or less unchanged in 20 years. I can't wait until they retire so they can be replaced with a cron job that doesn't need vacation.
I kept up with technology pretty much across the board, 10 years ago or so. But eventually you realize that
(a) this isn't part of your job - your employer only cares about particular things, which may or may not be modern
(b) you have a life, possibly a family, and that needs to be a priority as well
(c) there's too much to keep up with, and anyway, it's not possible to know what will stay important. Look ing only at programming languages: Java 8 was a big change, Javascript looks nothing like it did 10 years ago, is Ruby important? Rust? Scala?
Eventually you get tired of it. Yet another programming language, when you've used 20, and played with 20 more? It gets tiresome, and really, I haven't seen anything really innovative for ages, it's all just young folk reinventing old ideas.
I don't know the answer, but blithely saying you should keep up with the everything on your own time isn't very realistic.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You can't. Younger people can work much, much longer hours than you.
Which is only a plus if you ignore over a century of research showing diminishing and often negative productivity gains when working people too long.
People slow down as they age.
Citation needed. You're not even providing anecdotal evidence here - just an unfounded assumption.
Experience is overrated.
This can only come from someone without said experience. I'm not even that old, and I pretty regularly run across situations where I come up with better solutions to problems faster than less experienced individuals because of something related I've worked on.
Grow up.