Slashdot Mirror
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.
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Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off
As an older person, you can also ask for lower salary and less time off.
The work force still believes that simply getting a year older means they deserve a cushier job with more benefits and a higher salary, learning and experience not required.
This worked for a short time when the economy and population was growing exponentially, it still works for many who grow their skill set year in year out, but not so much any longer for your average Joe. In many cases it would make more sense to take a pay-cut every year. Since this concept is still so embedded in everyone's psyche, unfortunately, that is not what happens. companies just hold on to people until their salaries gets too unreasonable (or just never hire them full time) and then let them go.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
In an industry that favors cheap over good
Have gnu, will travel.
As I've gotten older I've realized that IT is a shitty field that harbors no respect from the organization you work for which leads to poor / non-existent support which causes even more disdain from the users they are supposed to be serving. Where I work, people often call our IT department "the NO team" because all you ever get from them is reasons why they won't support you or do something that would be helpful to everyone.
Leaving that field was the best thing I've ever done for my career and I have actually gained back my enjoyment of tinkering with technology that was lost while actually doing it for a living and make more money too.
Enter the field when you're young, but use it as a stepping stone to bigger and better things before the ageism kicks you to the curb.
You mean like how older people don't want to code or design for smart phones and tablets because they are a new thingy?
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.
Though there are software houses for banks and other industries that require lots of experienced talent and don't neasicarily want the latest but stable. You should try moving to finance banks and erp, and inventory systems. Very slow to adapt as stable and robust is more important.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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)
IT industry favors low-cost instead of high-cost. It has nothing to do with age. It's money talk.
Experienced technicians and engineers are costly, but may well prove cheaper if job requires high specialization, know-how and fast deployment of solutions.
It's not like senior staff does not adapt to new techs. It does, and it does it well, but at a higher cost (and overall quality is much higher too).
Alvie
I will be 67 this year. Because of Perl, I still get quite a lot of well-paid niche work. Also, happily (or because I was a sensible freelancer) I don't need full time either, my health is not too bad and I'm in the UK (admittedly the Conservative party is doing its level best to ruin universal healthcare here).
However I've recently begun to talk with other older technical people about problems that affect 'us' and that we can solve. There are plenty, without thinking about internet connected juicers and multi-zillion funding rounds. In fact, I was just invited into a start-up hothouse (apparently I am a 'talented outlier', whatever that means, perhaps someone younger can youngsplain? haha, only serious) and turned them down. What I/we aim at is more modest, more open and will provide some geeky fun on the journey too.
Ok, that's a bit of a manifesto now too, you know where to find me, just click on some intertubey stuff. Incidentally, I've never had a problem with young bosses and still enjoy new tech (less so, hype-tech). But, I think the best liberation for the seriously old, is to fashion some sort of destiny for ourselves.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Never go to human resources until you have another job offer. Period. If you are not operating from a position of strength you are simply viewed as a problem employee and they will work with your manager to get rid of you. If you have a job offer in hand, then your interactions with HR will be very different, you may even receive a raise and get changes you want. (But don't count on it) Human resources works for the company, they are not there to make you happy.
Yep those new mobile apps sure are great. Well coded with no bugs or user interface issues. Good job youth and inexperience. /snark
That's nice of you to show why the perception that older people are inflexible and stubborn has some basis in reality.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
Hey, if you'd rather be "principled" and unemployed rather than adaptive and employed, I guess that's your call.
I don't work in web or mobile - more in older traditional languages and programming environments, but even I'm not stupid enough to think that there's such a thing as "the good old days" with respect to technology. It's all the same shit - or, to be well adjusted, it's all the same cool stuff.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'm one of those, I was in one of the first high schools in the nation to teach programming in the 70's. I've watched languages come and go, technologies boom and bust. About 6 years ago I finally had to move from production into management. I know others that went into consulting. I retire in a few years, I'm happy, I navigated it and it works.
When life ends at 30, you don't have to kill yourself. What you do is put on a white robe and a hockey mask and fly up into a giant bug-zapper while the young watch.
There is zero interest in this 61 year old ever getting back in. No one will even listen.
Too bad as I am far more knowledgeable about what constitutes a usable interface than 99% of the programmers who think they know how to code a UI.
Like many old craftsmen before me It looks I will be taking my skills to the grave.
(for the record; I created one of the first mouse driven file and time management systems in DOS in 1983.)
No, I got too much muscle to float. But I can jog in the swimming pool with the waterline at my jowls.
I'm almost 53, and the company I currently work for, while it has its young'ns, most of the developers in my group are at least in their '40s. We get paid well, and get "unlimited vacation" which all of us use with good discretion. I suppose I have it good - I have yet to encounter ageism as described by many of these /. stories.
"...Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off.
Kudos to TFS for cutting through the bullshit to identify the real reason ageism exists.
I grow tired of looking for other excuses when it's rather obvious what the cause is.
Greed.
And no, there does not appear to be an escape from that.
Kill yourself.
Slashdot's universal answer to every problem in society. Too bad that the advice givers don't follow their own advice.
1. Some percentage of people are reluctant to learn new ways of doing things.
2. For younger people this means learning old ways of doing things and for old people this means new ways of doing things.
3. If a company discriminates against people for only being willing to do things the old way, they will also be indirectly be discriminating against older people.
I suspect that if a young person demanded a much higher salary, and refused to learn new things, they would also be discriminated against. I have met some young people like this, but not many.
I'm the youngest at 47 in government IT with many grey beards walking around. I'm able to wear my frosty white beard even though the rest of my hair is salt-and-pepper. If I was working in the private sector, the beard will have to come off because it makes me look too old.
Pushing 60. I started as a full-stack developer writing interdepartmental apps using a 4GL. Been an analyst, technical lead, lead architect, embedded systems programmer, and now come full circle to full-stack web development. I've kept up, and currently trying to push my organization from JQuery/Handlebars/Express (infrastructure groundwork I put down 4 years ago) to ES6/React/Redux/GraphQL.
It's hard, because the 40-somethings I work with are Javascript fatigued. They just want the merry-go-round to stop. For me, to stop learning is death. But I appear to be losing the battle in pushing to stay on top of current practice,
But here's the problem: when job searching, the cohort I compete against is invariably much, much younger. I wouldn't have this problem if I had stuck with C++ or Java my entire career. As someone previously posted, I'm an "outlier". The best counter I've come up with is to write about what I know and what I am learning.
I my mind, too many organizations want a "buddy" culture. It's not what I want, I want to do good work and deliver. The best way to gel a team IMO is to always be learning and delivery value to your end-user. Take pride as a team in your work, not in your team standing in Super Mario (that came up in a recent interview I had. Really.)
Anyhow, I might try freelancing. :-/
If you post it, they will read.
And still working for someone else, you've failed at life. You can't be aged out by some young boss if you are the boss.
I was part of a 25% layoff in a company where most workers were remote. Many of us suspected ageism. The company refused to provide the list when I requested it, because I was the only person laid off in my state. This was a software company owned by an equity fund with a whole army of oily lawyers.
Industry favors "cheap and docile" over "expensive and of opinion".
*lifting 1500 calorie blocks if butter 3x a day by the look of it.
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/871058214455881728
I am months from FRA, if you kids don’t know what that means, you will one day. Been a coder, designer, manager, systems engineer, security researcher, and now again code monkey. Started with Fortran, then assembly, then C, a stint on Ada, back to C and now some C++.
Back in the hard times of 2009 I was laid off for as much age as wage, and being on a project at end of life. Take your pick as the primary cause, I’d weight them about equally.
Working with kids now and out of my league on C++ (did mostly C embedded in my day). But, I get by and would prefer to be back in systems engineering (requirements, not keeping the computers updated).
My little advice here is to consider work in the defense sector, where I’ve spent most of my career. Most of these big companies have long term continuing projects that depend on detailed knowledge of specific technologies and they depend on people with that knowledge staying on board. Some companies suck, but most treat people well to keep them. You’ll need a security clearance, but that has not been a big deal. Over the years I’ve contributed to things under the sea and up to out in space.
Ready to enjoy life.
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.
No shit. More common sense advise. News at 11. It is incredible that something so simple escapes the minds of otherwise (or supposedly) intelligent professionals. Ageism is always going to exist, and it will hit hardest for those who aren't flexible or expect to retire in-place.
Being proactive, that's the cure for a lot of shit.
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
Older IT people are screwed because younger HR people and their doofus plug'n'play ideas have displaced older HR people, and Dilbert's Boss let it happen. They personally lack the experience (or desire, or authority) to read people for substance. That's why you can no longer walk into a building and fill out an application (or in the real old days) get an on the spot appointment with a real human who is in the business of judging people and can return real a real answer, even if it's not the answer you want. They still pay their people for that but they're not getting their money's worth. No.... you're given a custom URL into MyAssinineCloudEmployeeSolution.com to feed some outsource HR behemoth (who sells you and your information countless times, best to use a throw-away email for each job search) and for you that's that. You're waiting for a phone call that will never happen.
Now I'm sure these return phone calls can happen, but we must assume they won't, because sanity and self-esteem matters, and when you begin to sense that you'll have to cover twice as much distance for the same opportunity it's way past time to invest in a new direction, one in which your unique experience might pay off and be rewarded. It will likely have nothing to do with IT, but guess what, you may never have to explain to anyone why Microsoft keeps removing settings and options from Windows 10 when it's supposed to be better. Ever. Again.
You won't have to explain to anyone why you 'cannot say no' to Windows 10 updates. Ever. Again. No need to try and sell your boss's boss on open source software because your boss came shrink-wrapped from the factory. No need to declare any new idea to be "full of shit" and have it implemented anyway because they didn't like your face when you said it.
Welcome to 2017, older folks! These are the days stores close when the Internet goes out. People toss working computers that would still be working in 10 years into the dumpster because they invested in unrepairable crap designed to cook itself to death. Young folk who cannot presently afford a car down payment are mooning about self-driving cars as if the insurance companies won't chase real drivers off the road (to make stupid cars 'safe') and (surprise!) be taxicabs they won't be able to afford. And these people, along with the new HR staffs, just cannot be dealt with.
So leave IT and start heading to a place where you could dig in and wait out this tsunami of stupid. Find something you're comfortable doing, it is guaranteed to be less stressful, and take the time to hone your superior IT skills along with other valuable skills you have, in your free time. Gather that stuff people are throwing out, along with other 'old tech' that comes your way. Finish that course on-line, work with your hands if you haven't been, drive a backhoe, dig a ditch. Learn not to bitch. Get in shape.
When (not if) the economy crashes all the way down, you'll be ready to step back in. The most fragile threads will unravel, everyone will be amazed how many sorry-ass ideas are hanging by a thread... and that 'old tech' will be valuable once again along with people who actually know how to maintain it and get things working together without being handed a shrink-wrap solution.
And some day, if all goes well (or even OK) with you you'll say... "and to think this all started by being turned down again for a no-brainer job..."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This sounds like everything about ageism I've ever read. Stay current. Keep ahead of the game. Keep learning, blah, blah blah..... That's bullshit.
It is not at all bullshit. But staying slightly ahead of widespread technology, I've been able to completely avoid any kind of ageism at work.
I have seen too may people who as they grow old, stop growing in any other way. They just do the same job they've been doing for years until eventually that job does not need doing anymore, for whatever reason. That goes for even relatively young people too, it's just that generally they are not as complacent.
But the truth is that educating yourself and keeping ahead of things makes you an especially attractive employee and prevents problems of all kinds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Upper mgmt. decided to dive in all the 'cool' kids tech. Our team is large and ranges in age from mid 20s to myself at 51. I'd say that the cool kids are full of enthusiasm but they are making dramatic mistakes that is costing us time and money. Same way outsourcing was proven to work sometimes, I think the coolness of youth will also be re-evaluated at some point and the experience of old will be appreciated more.
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.
... take a salary cut so that you can compete with what seems to matter most to many employers: the higher salary costs of the older workers.
Strong and obese are not mutually exclusive.
Reality is you get burned out in this field pretty quickly. A lot of "senior" staff I see at any place found some little niche of job security, and translated their job from making good code to making managers like them, on a personal level. According to them, you gotta dig your heels in deep and don't budge, once you find a company with the right kind of dirt to do so.
Me, I change jobs every few years. I fix everything, piss off all the people following the above mantra, and go somewhere new with interesting challenges.
The key thing is to know and remember the bad code, test fixes privately. When you find bugs in your own code, make a note, but don't fix it. When a critical flaw makes things go bad, and you find the solution, sit on it. Wait for the situation to escalate. Wait till the news reaches two or three levels above your boss. Maintain a calm but serious attitude. Show concern, keep saying, "I will fix this in time. Don't you guys worry!". Then when they start thinking of hiring big time trouble shooters at 500$ an hour, take a sleeping bag to work, watch TV on your cell phone, fix it a 2AM, send "Fixed!" emails and sleep in the server room.
Two incidents like this, they will never ever think of firing you.
They have the power. You have the knowledge. You can win them if you don't have any old fashioned misplaced sense of loyalty.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
IMO this misstates what's actually happening. The industry doesn't value youth over experience per se; it values cheap over expensive. If you don't expect to be paid much more than the young guys then companies will happily hire you. The disconnect is that older developers assign more value to their experience than employers do.
Okay what, it's a thing? I mean we always knew most companies are cheap greedy pieces of shit who don't really understand how the magic box works and just wants to pay the least possible for making the magic box work.
They also don't understand how the failures cost them so much money and they could have saved it with experienced IT workers but fuck them, they made their bed, let them lie in it.
If I make an offer to you, am I being greedy to offer you $100k instead of $110k? $110k instead of $120k? Etc.? Where does it stop? Employers always want to pay their staff as little as possible. Staff want to be paid as much as possible. Hence the dance of negotiation, trying to estimate what those similar to one's self are being paid, etc. It seems stupid to characterize "wanting to lower personnel costs" as "greed".
They can, yes. Do they? Not in my experience. The technical staff where I work (Fin Tech) is pretty diverse age-wise. Many of the younger folks are the out-by-5pm type. Some of the older folks are the committing-stuff-at-2am type. This particular employer doesn't expect people to work crazy hours, so to the extent people do, it's purely a personal choice.
tsunami of stupid
stunami of tsupid?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Also, does everyone need to be able to read? Bring back village scribes!
Hmm. Older workers paid more for the same work vs women paid less for the same work. Not exactly apples and oranges.
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
The purpose of a lawsuit is not to get your job back or to force someone to hire you. Anybody attempting that is an idiot. The purpose of a lawsuit is to A. get monetary compensation for lost wages due to unfair termination or lack of hiring or whatever, and B. make your former employer (or former prospective employer) serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry.
If one company gets away with illegal hiring practices, whether it's ageism, gender discrimination, or something else entirely, then other companies will see their behavior and assume that it must be acceptable, because otherwise the first company would have gotten sued or prosecuted. Eventually an entire industry ends up doing something illegal. The only way to prevent illegal hiring practices from running rampant is to ensure that the anyone engaged in illegal hiring practices gets punished in a timely fashion by the court system.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
While it seems to generate anger from some on Slashdot, it really is a problem that a non-trivial number of older tech workers have and one that they can solve: Stay up to date and relevant with your knowledge. Tech is a fast and continually moving field, so you always need to be learning.
When older IT folks have a problem, and many do not, it is usually this. I work at a university so we see a huge range of ages. We have student workers who are 18-22 and of course start with basically zero experience, and we have staff ranging from 20s-80s. Some of those older staff are amazing. They are up to date on the latest stuff and have mountains of experience to draw on. They can come up with extremely elegant solutions to problems, can see pitfalls that others can't (because they've encountered them before) and so on.
However others are worthless stick-in-the-mud types. They do things 10, 20, 30 years out of date. They are clueless about new tech, new methods, new threats. They are extremely inefficient in their solutions, etc, etc. They are basically impediments to real work getting done. Things like trying to use NIS authentication, or treating Windows 10 like Windows XP, etc.
While I'm not saying that will magically make ageism go away, or that it'll make every company value older workers, it really will keep you valuable and relevant and your chances of being able to find and keep work will be much higher. Not every company is full of young kids working 80 hours a week on some hot new trend. In fact I'd say most aren't. There are lots of big, established, firms that want to get shit done and need tech people to do it. Chances are you can find work with one of them, but only if you are actually useful.
Also related to that, but think about getting a relevant certification periodically and keeping it current. It is a way to demonstrate to HR/PHB types that you are continuing to learn, a way to quantify your skills, and actually an opportunity for learning. It is a good way to quantify continuing education. Also while I don't know that they open many doors, they can keep doors from being closed.
Someone has to write all the original code that gets uploaded to StackOverflow so the younger programmers can pull it down and use for their job assignments. Since that appears to be all that CS classes are teaching.
Have gnu, will travel.
Put some teeth in age related anti-discrimination laws, and it would help.
It would also help a bit to make long-term jobless a protected category and to remove any advantage for employers to dodge using FTE's.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You're incorrectly making the assumption that the employer can do no wrong and the job seeker is always at fault.
If anything, it shows a need to bring the employers to heel so that they have to find ways to (directly and in good faith) hire citizens, even if they're older or long-term jobless.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That requires an assumption that the employer is without blame (they are with it).
Get rid of their entitlement mentality and "stuck in the mud" excuses, then you'll see them find ways to make good value out of alleged "deadwood".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The work force still believes that simply getting a year older means they deserve a cushier job with more benefits and a higher salary, learning and experience not required.
While employers think that they're always without blame and that it's always the jobseeker's fault.
Perhaps it's time for the employer to take the pain.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am around 50, I work with Computer Engineers (yes, with engineering degrees) with a typical age well under 30. They are some of the most conservative old school programmers I have worked with.
Happy with Python 2.6 because it was what they used last. Happy with C or C++ from the 90s. Unit testing... WTF is that good for? They pretty much live up to every stereotype of a 65 year old programmer.
Then it gets even better. They advocate a bastardized version of Agile when they are working on projects that are nearly a perfect fit for PMI style management. Yet they avoid innovation and change and actual agility like it is the bogeyman.
I have hived off a group of programmers who wanted to change (of mostly younger ages) and have my own dept that is now running circles around the bulk of the company. I am not sure what percentage of them want to come aboard, but it has hit a point where the old guard freak me out so much that I will probably only staff my department from new hires. (of any age as long as they are willing to innovate and grow as hard as they can)
I guess it's funny that Slashdot 7-digit members are approaching the 5-million mark? But really, that spelling error was the only funny comment on the deep topic? Even acknowledging the intrinsic sadness of the topic, that's a new level of disappointment for Slashdot. Wasn't really expecting any insight, so no real disappointment there.
Ekronomics 101. 'Nuff said.
Okay, I'll say a bit more. http://www.timewellspent.io/ is interesting and relevant in various ways.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Where on earth do you work where they don't? Guys and Gals in their 20s are trying to pay school loans, but cars, houses and start a family. They're desperate to get ahead. They're also naive enough to think putting in 80 hr/wk is a good idea. And don't get me started on H1-B visas. They're completely at the employees mercy.
Yeah, some old people work a lot. I knew a lot of 'em at my job. Knew. Past tense. I know at least 3 that died from overwork. Heart Attacks and Strokes. With rare exception that doesn't happen to young people...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's a good one. I was going to suggest a Soylent Green reference.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
You can't. Younger people can work much, much longer hours than you. That's just a fact. People slow down as they age. Experience is overrated. If I'm running a business I need 1 experienced guy to watch 10 code monkeys, 4 guys from real universities and the 1 guy from MIT that does the hard bits.
Coding isn't like shoveling coal, and if you ever developed yourself or cluefully managed other developers you'd know this. "If I'm running a business"... no you're not - I bet you're not even in the industry.
A talented, experienced developer totally blows the inexperienced ones out of the water in terms of raw productivity.
After looking at your profile picture, I can guarantee that you would float quite easily.
That picture is four years old. Here's a current pic.
https://www.cdreimer.com/slashdot.html
Even if you're strong for your build, you've got enough "insulation" that you're going to float like a witch.
Muscle is denser than fat. So when I'm in a swimming pool, I'm standing on the bottom of the pool at the five feet deep without floating.
So is any normal adult [...]
Thank you for acknowledging that I don't float a witch!
It goes with "SJW" and is a similar meaningless political insult directed at people the insultees see as being unfit to being considered a worthwhile member of society. For example, a person complaining about needing wheelchair access to get into a building is a "special snowflake" for complaining when a person who could walk would not.
It's a term that escaped from the political argument cesspool and has become common enough that it's no longer a reliable idiot detector, especially since it sometimes gets deliberately turned around - eg. describing a baker "triggered" by being asked to make a cake for a gay person as a "special snowflake".
Incredibly juvenile and more than a little disgusting in places but that's politics for you.
To a normal adult, it's simply standing in the pool and they don't think about it. I on the other hand note the fact that I do not float and mark it off as an accomplishment.
Literally everyone else looks at you and sees this [...]
No, more like this.
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/863479397117870080/
I myself am a 54 year old tech worker. I've never had a problem getting a job. I never do the same thing for more than 18 months, meaning try and change up skill sets without necessarily changing jobs. I am working on new certs, always...
My expertise and experiences are respected and sought out by management and junior workers. I am a coach, a mentor, and a student.
I do know those who've done the same thing for, well, decades, but that's the person, not all of us... remember, you'll be there too someday. How do you the next generation to reflect on you? The valuable sage, or waste of space?
Some co's run it if it were, and end up with short-term band-aides and put-out-fires mode of thinking that becomes institutionalized.
Table-ized A.I.
Keeping up with the latest fads is a lot of work and often pointless, both because the fad will be gone in a couple of years and because after you've been around enough tools and technologies, picking up another one because it happens to fit the new project is easy. You shouldn't have to already know it.
But where the "learn all the things!" approach goes really wrong, IMO, is that it doesn't give you any obvious advantage over the young guys who learn the same new fads. "But I know two dozen other languages that we're not using on this project" offers no clear value that is visible to your typical non-technical hiring manager.
So what can offer that advantage? Learning things that can't be picked up in a few weeks or months.Thing like deep specialization in a particularly gnarly area of software development, or broad and deep knowledge of an industry. I know a guy who commands hourly rates that would make senior lawyers salivate, because he knows the credit card industry inside out and backwards, not just the technology, and its history, but the business side as well. My own area of expertise is security, especially of the cryptologic sort, and especially in relatively tiny devices.
The other thing older software developers should be doing, IMO, is broadening their scope of influence. If you're just cutting code it's hard for people to distinguish your value from a fresh college grad doing the same thing (note that I'm not saying that you aren't much better than the new grad, just not in ways that are easy to see). Take advantage of your depth of experience -- and your wealth of industry/technology expertise -- and start thinking bigger, identifying problems that could be solved and evangelizing those solutions. This requires networking, and politicking... but those are two other things that take many years to learn to do, and you should learn to do them.
To use the jargony phrase: become a "thought leader". A real one, with useful and valuable ideas and the ability to execute on those ideas.
Note that in some companies (but not most, in my experience) the only practical way to broaden your scope is to move into management. If that's not what you want to do, you may have to either create a new sort of position for yourself within the company, or move somewhere else that allows you to have greater influence and impact while staying technical.
If this sounds harder than keeping up with the fads... yeah, it is. It requires you to branch out, learn things outside of what would normally be your area, develop "soft" skills, look for the bigger picture and how you can create a role for yourself in that bigger picture. But if you do it, then you clearly and obviously deserve to make a lot more money than that new college grad, perhaps several times as much, because you do what the new grad, or even a team of new grads, cannot, and everyone can see it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
When one is presented with two options, and chooses the better option, that isn't automatically greed.
Older people may be able to produce a higher quality product, justifying their higher price tag. But the market doesn't want to pay for the higher quality product, they are willing to accept some bugs and issues for a cheaper product. Of course they want the cheaper product to be just as good as the expensive one...but they pick the cheaper product nonetheless.
If buyers are picking the cheaper product, employers must pick the cheaper employees.
There is also quite a lot of greed in the world...but not every profitable decision is born of a vice.
The chasm between the 99% and the 1% continues to get wider and wider. That is driven by Greed.
Those who are making the business decisions are doing so in order to put more money back into their pockets. A 10-year strategic plan has turned into a 10-month plan. Executives are quick to get in, get theirs, and get out before competition consumes them, or a monopoly buys them out. Greed continues to drive reductions in force. The remaining workers are burdened with doing the work of the departed, and executives get bigger bonuses for sustaining the management mantra of doing more with less, which is now their creed. And this isn't some one-off anomaly. This is occurring everywhere, feeding the widening chasm.
Also, consumers can be rather ignorant as to what creates the ability to be cheap. A $5 t-shirt is better than the the same shirt priced at $20, not realizing the true cost was burdened in a sweat shop full of workers who represent 21st century slave labor. Yet another shining example of Greed at the helm.
In most companies, HR works for your manager, not you.
You've got the following options as you approach 50.
1. Get promoted to upper management. This works for like 1-2% of tech workers. Maybe less. And you're no longer a tech worker when it happens.
2. Burrow into an unpopular niche that your employer needs to maintain a profitable line of business. I've seen this work for friends who were gainfully employed into their 70s. It works for like 0.1% of tech workers.
3. Start your own company. It doesn't have to be tech-based, but your chances of successs go way up if you start a business that competes with a business for which you've worked as an employee. You'll need interpersonal skills that most tech workers lack. This works for like 5% of techies.
4. Live very frugally, save most of your take-home pay in your 20s and 30s and retire in your mid 40s to live in a small RV as a campground host in a state park. This takes incredible discipline. The kind of discipline that, if you had it, you'd have gone to medical school. It works for like 1% of techies.
5. Win powerball. No need to do the math here, it won't happen.
Default Option for 80%: Become an Uber driver, Bite Squad delivery driver or temp worker. Big income downshifting and lack of employment is what's happening for most tech workers after age 50.
No.
Not unless we get younger.
One of the problems I see is ageism plus experiencism. When they want someone with 15 years experience who is under 30.
Often they combine this with the fact that the technology they're demanding 15 years experience in is less than 5 years old
Keep your skills fresh, go with trends in the industry instead of bitching about them and resisting them. Exercise, eat healthy, keep your mind sharp.
We'll make great pets
Wally has his job for life:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-02-25
(Like me.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
"...Another labor attorney even suggests tech firms are hiring younger workers because they ask for lower salaries and less time off.
Kudos to TFS for cutting through the bullshit to identify the real reason ageism exists.
I grow tired of looking for other excuses when it's rather obvious what the cause is.
Greed.
And no, there does not appear to be an escape from that.
There's no escaping greed, it's a basic human characteristic. However, the effect you're talking about is a good thing, and you don't want to lose it.
Greed is the engine that drives development and distribution of competitive products at competitive prices. It's what gave you the high standard of living you have. Free markets are so effective at providing goods and services for the lowest prices only because greed drives all the participants to maximize their own profits.
I'd like to point to the outcome of a society that abolished greed, but there's never been one, not beyond very small scales for very short periods of time. The USSR and other states that tried communism attempted to build greed-free economic structures, and they did create an economic structure that was not propelled by greed, and without that drive their system plodded along ever slower, unable to provide adequately for the populace. Meanwhile, the free(ish) markets of the west filled stores to bursting with every kind of good that the public might want. The difference? One harnessed greed to positive effect, driving innovation and productivity up, while the other failed to channel it, resulting in a culture of endemic corruption that persists in most of the former Soviet countries even today.
Greed is good. Yes, even when it motivates employers to choose the least expensive workers who can do the job adequately.
If as a senior software engineer you want to get paid more for working less, you need to bring something to the table that justifies your higher pay. You need to be more effective, demonstrably so.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I work with a lot of people younger than me (like 10-20 years younger) and there are cultures that get created in an office which can be hard to relate to for older people. It's kind of a generation gap thing.
I think it's possible for older workers to kind of wind up the odd man out socially -- not because they're bad workers, lazy, unskilled, bitter, etc, but because they don't share the same generational influences and life-stage interests. And this itself can lead to performance integration problems if the company is weakly led and managed and workflow is really organic and not process driven.
What I've found interesting is watching it change over time, as about half the younger group have started having kids and living a lifestyle more similar to mine. The subgroup with kids actually starts interacting less with the childless guys.
When I worked IT years ago it was all about knowledge of the latest technology that counted. As technology moves on, knowledge of older technology (like X.25 or Decnet) just becomes useless so there is little perceived advantage to being older even though the system issues like manageability, reliability, and performance stay somewhat constant. It's the only job I know of where experience works against you! Young people, many times, get to learn the technology before they actually start working which is an enormous advantage. I became frustrated with the greatly increased complexity of technology with little additional benefits and decided it was time to get out before my bad attitude forced me out. It was the best decision I ever made and I would NEVER encourage anyone to get into IT because you WILL "age out" eventually in the private sector.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
That's my take on it. With a new reorganization in order to prep for moving to the cloud, we were forced to move our simple lamp system to the web-server system which didn't have any development tools built-in. And security paranoia prevents me from installing anything (for now) on my work pc. Therefore, after working in KDE and Eclipse, I am now back to programming in vi over a telnet terminal. And doing Oracle dba and sysdamin work that way.
It sux.
I can see I am wasting a lot of time. But at least I now have no desire to try refactoring anything.
The jobs that were sent to India and China weren't stolen by other countries; they were sold and the money put in the pockets of the CEOs.
Theoretically, if America still had the top 90% tax rate of the 1950s (that allowed us to invest in America and rebuild the rest of the world) the CEOs would not have sold those jobs because they woudln't have received any more money in their own pockets. In the 1950s, money rained down to the lower classes because execs could only get perks such as country club memberships (jobs for caddys) and company cars (jobs for drivers) and you might as well pay your employees better and they can afford to buy houses and cars and hire maids and gardeners.
Read Advanced Economics by Sowell
I'm going to be 42 in a month, and I'm already starting to see a little bit of ageism creeping in. My plan to "navigate" it is to keep my skills sharp and relevant, and try to be as much of a generalist as possible.
I have a decent stable job, but I do go on practice interviews occasionally if I see something I might potentially take if the situation were right. Mature industries like healthcare, education, banking, government, etc. still do hire some people based on experience rather than youthfulness and cheapness. At the same time, if those companies don't care about their IT or development, they're increasingly turning to the offshore body shops. The sweet spot seems to be those companies that aren't hair-on-fire SV startups, but realize that there's an advantage to be had if you have a good IT environment and use it well. The other choice is a more established software/services company (where I am now) that doesn't demand 100 hour weeks cranking out iterations of the latest phone app or web API.
The one thing I would suggest is that the quote from the article about being a lifelong learner is spot on. Employers love to use the stereotype of the older IT worker or developer who isn't flexible and therefore not a good hire. But, like every stereotype there is a little truth. The company I work for is doing work in Azure, and I'm jumping in head-first while maintaining my traditional skill set. Other people I work with...not so much. I hear a lot of "this cloud thing will never catch on" or "DevOps is stupid" -- OK, ironic moustache hipster DevOps is silly, but the core ideas are really good and being up to date on this stuff isn't a bad idea. Also, the generalist thing can't be overstated. This new project I'm working on uses Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, and we have interviewed a lot of candidates for help with design, etc. Big-company IT will easily let you pigeonhole yourself into a very narrow specialty; I'm seeing a lot of people who have been doing XenApp administration, exclusively, for ages and have not really been able to move into other areas. I also know a lot of people who are SAN or Cisco network experts -- great when everyone is using the technology, but not so great when industry shifts like SDN and storage virtualization take place. Companies are looking for flexible people who aren't locked into one skill.
I'm hoping that the Millenials having kids will start to reverse the ageism trend. They may be having fewer, but not everyone is 30 and still living at home or wafting through life. Once "these kids" start having lives outside of work and family responsibilities, I think some of the attitudes will change. I _really_ don't want to be one of those folks who gets laid off at age 57 and has to figure out a way to live until they can access their retirement savings or Social Security because no one will hire them.
My 1st layoff I was a SysAdmin. At the unemployment office they had me try to find the job title in a book. No System Administrator in that book.
I've done fine with that title in large & small companies running various Unixen and desktops over the years. I'm doing cloud and development nowadays. There is training for some of this, but it's always been at least as good to learn on your own.
Nowadays, with internet and inexpensive computer kit and virtualization it's so easy to learn at home. My 486 to learn Linux was $3-6k. I can get a 5 node cluster of Raspberry PIs for $300 to learn containers and the basics of cloud. Or a PC to learn OpenStack.
bringing any concerns about ageism to your Human Resources department
LOL ... As if HR was there to help you, the pathetic employee.
Industry favors "cheap and docile" over "expensive and of opinion".
This is another way of saying younger people are more naive about how the world works and more likely to guzzle the corporate Koolaid than those who are older and wiser. Because they have less experience, they are also paid less.
We'll make great pets
... take a salary cut so that you can compete with what seems to matter most to many employers: the higher salary costs of the older workers.
There's a society-related problem here. The older workforce, because it drank the "American Dream" Koolaid more, went into more debt with larger, more expensive lifestyles. They had families and kids, all of which are more expensive than a single millenial living in a single bedroom apartment or millienials sharing room and board expenses. Those of us that have families and kids can't just put them back to make a switch to a millenial lifestyle to be more competitive. I'm not saying it's an excuse, but you can't ignore economic and social circumstances. What do you propose be done about that?
I can say, in hindsight (always 20/20), given the state of affairs in America, a more minimalist lifestyle would have been more advantageous but I can't exactly jump in a time machine to go back and change my life strategy at this point.
We'll make great pets
Unit testing... WTF is that good for?
Whoever has this opinion should get ejected from this field, do not pass GO. Software complexity has crossed a threshold where you have nearly 0 chance of having predictable software behavior without modern testing and continuous integration/testing strategies. Plenty of literature out there to support this claim with evidence.
We'll make great pets
Even the ones who are less than 5 feet tall?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Now now, we'll get those noisy people off your lawn.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
...Greed is good. Yes, even when it motivates employers to choose the least expensive workers who can do the job adequately.
History has shown that greed can often create good things. Yes, this is true.
However, I want you to remember your statement as Greed drives to change history forever, replacing the human workforce with automation, because it's cheaper.
In the next half century, Greed will look to destroy the concept of human employment completely with the creation of AI. Note that it won't even take true AI to replace 80% of human workers. Near-AI solutions will be all it takes to prove a machine can do anything you can do in the workplace better, faster, and most importantly, cheaper.
Humanity has used and abused Greed throughout history. But unless we Solve for Greed, I do feel it will ultimately lead to our demise.
Ugh ... tried finding C++ work 7 years ago. Was hard to even get an interview (was 29 at the time). A lot of C++ devs chasing very few C++ jobs. When I switched to C# (which is not in the top 3 programming lanuages according to TIOBE, PYPL, etc) and got lots of people waving money at me.
All that to say sometimes older tech means you are competing against A LOT of people for only a few positions. That being said I'm thinking about learning mainframe stuff. It doesn't really show on Google Trends, but I saw a bunch of hits on indeed.com.