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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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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)
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.
Had two young hotshots in from a consulting firm who worked on a problem for months. Got stuck.
Finally sent an old timer over to review work. He said he could not figure out what they were trying to do.
Asked for user requirements, designed solution in two days.
Gave it to a junior employee who had it coded and tested in 2 weeks.
Got a refund from the consulting company.
It is a lot easier to teach an old dog new development environments that to teach the business and tricks of the trade to hot shot college graduates.
Just ask the BBC.
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"
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.
If you stopped learning at 25, that will not be an option though.
This. I've known people who got stuck in their tech careers because they thought learning was for school and saw no need to learn as an adult. Several became drug store clerks after getting laid off in the dot com bust, taking six month vacations on unemployment benefits, and being told that their skills were obsolete by recruiters. A book, a boot camp or professional development courses was all they needed to jump start their careers.
DOS and Win3.1 and Linux are all useless [...]
DOS -> DOS/Win3.1 -> Win95(DOS) -> WinXP -> Win10(Linux Bash)
Nothing you said is relevant to mobile apps or cloud automation or social media marketing.
Neither mobile apps nor the cloud has replaced the desktop in the enterprise space.
You don't have any skills. Time for you to die.
I'm holding up a finger. Take a guess which one.
All through my professional career I've bought eval boards for various new products so I can play with them in my weekends. Several of my coworkers thought I was crazy to pay stuff from my own money, and to work in my own time.
"...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.
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.
Both have outdated credentials and the safe assumption is the oldster who looks worthless is worthless.
You need to periodically renew your credentials. I got my associate degree in General Education in 1994 and my second associate degree in Computer Programming in 2007. I list the 2007 degree on my resume. Some hiring managers who hire me over the phone are surprised that I'm not under 30. I'll replace the 2007 degree in five years by taking project management development courses at UCSC Silicon Valley. What most people don't realize is that you have to actively manage your career. No one else will do it for you.
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.
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.
Industry favors "cheap and docile" over "expensive and of opinion".
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>
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.
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
A book, a boot camp or professional development courses was all they needed to jump start their careers.
That and a genuine interest in their chosen field of expertise. I find many IT people lack that these days. As it still if a fast-moving field, that will make non-learners obsolete eventually. I think this whole thing may not be ageism at all, but just too many that chose a fast-moving field and either could not keep up or did not even want to. In a slow-moving field, here your initial education stays useful for 50 years or longer and just getting a bit of experience makes you current, firing older workers could well be ageism, but in a fast-moving field it could well be primarily a problem with those that have fallen behind. Of course, many of those affected do not want to hear that and crying "Ageism!" and playing the victim-card is far easier.
That is not to say keeping up is not hard. Especially if you went into IT not because you love it, but for other reasons, keeping up can be very hard. But nobody can honestly say it was not clear what they were getting into in this regard.
So, sure, there is some ageism in the IT industry, and those practicing it pay for that. But I think it is nowhere near as bad as often claimed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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)
And that would just be wrong. Sure, employers can be ageist, but can you blame them looking at stagnant IT people that never were really good when they were current on things? The main problem is, I think, that IT is hard and many, many people got into it for the wrong reasons. These are now screwed. (Side note: All this "learn to code" nonsense will produce more of these 20 years down the road or so.) That is not to say I have no sympathy for them, but giving them jobs were they will do more harm than good is not the solution. (And I have seen such people time and again.) I think those that still have some drive should be given a chance to learn something else, and hopefully something they are actually passionate about this time. For the rest, I don't know. Give them an UBI and hope they find at least a hobby they care about?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It really depends. Small consulting businesses (say 2...20 employees) usually try very hard to send you the person you need, because they do not have a well-known name and need to compete on merit. Large consulting enterprises (IBM, etc.) send you however they have and often worse people than they could have sent because they will work more hours on a problem and hence bring in more money.
Caveat: I have experience with an IBM consulting team working for a large enterprise. "Incompetent and arrogant" sums it up pretty well. Initially I proposed to have regular meeting with them because I was working on something similar (I am from one of those small consulting companies) and I thought there could be synergies. We quietly decided to not have any meetings anymore after the first one after one of these pricks tried to explain to me how a web-server works and just managed to demonstrate his utter cluelessness. A few months later their project failed completely, because they could not deliver anything that worked within 4 years. For example, in all that time they never bothered to find out what load they needed to cope with (I know because I was asked for my numbers by the people that had to clean up that mess).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, one CAN ask for a lower salary.
I feel that once people starts racing for the bottom of the wage pile they will find it already occupied by people from India with advanced degrees but no practical knowledge.
At some point the HR manager decides that he/she can replace an "overpaid" engineers with a couple engineers in China or India who. combined, make way less and have lots more initials in their CVs. The HR manager pushes for doing the same thing with the entire department saving the company millions. He and management all collect hefty bonuses. The HR manager, knowing what he's done, gets outta Dodge before the schmidt hits the fan. A year later new product development has stalled, maintenance releases have introduced defects instead of fixes and management has to explain it to the board of directors by blaming the former HR director. The President and the Director of Engineering both get drilled. The company's stock tanks. The now retired HR manager lounging on the beach in Costa Rica smiles as his put options have now become very valuable.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Hahaha....lots of experience with this game. Here is how it's played:
Big Consulting Company:
All of them (IBM, Deloitte, etc.) have the same model - up or out. Meaning that the one and only goal is to get promoted to partner. If you make it, it's the land of milk and honey. If you don't you're gone. So what happens is that a lot of the really good, strong technical people get fed up with the politics and leave. What remains, generally, are the ass kissers. That and a bunch of wet behind the ears recent grads that have lots of energy but don't know much. Generally on a large project you will have 2-3 relatively good consultants and they get all the face time with the client. The wet behind the ears types are put in the back room, training on your nickel. The partners show up at go-live weekend, golf outings and selected social and networking events.
Small Consulting Company:
This is generally where you find the people that are more interested in getting things done than climbing the corporate ladder. But the good ones will be stretched really thin, often serving 3 or more clients at the one time. Small consulting places rarely carry a bench and rarely if ever do any sort of training for their consultants. Burnout is common. Often, turnover is high as a result.
When I bring in consultants I always use smaller outfits. They will work harder for your business and are more committed to quality. I won't even take calls from the Big 4.
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.
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.
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