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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So this is your answer to lack of skilled high tech?
Move into management or be fired?
Same old MBA nonsense.
MOST techies are "Do'ers" instead of "people handlers" and your solution is retrain away from core competency or be fired
Talk about no clue.
"...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.
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.
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>
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.
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
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.