Should Workplaces Be Re-Defined To Retain Older Tech Workers? (wired.com)

rgh02 submitted this article from Backchannel which argues companies "need to work harder and more persistently to attract, retain, and recognize talent" -- especially older talent: We "elders" know perfectly well that our workplaces are by and large not about us. We don't drive how roles, functions, advancement, and success are seen. Career development options and the hierarchical career ladders everyone is expected to climb are designed for the majority: younger workers. What can be done? There has to be a systems overhaul...
The article suggests restructuring workplaces with "individual contributor tracks" which reward people who don't go on to become managers, as well as things like paid mentoring positions and "phased retirement" programs that create part-time positions to allow a more gradual transition into retirement.

Comments

IT is not unique

[Bruce66423]

There are many professions that make little provision for people who don't want to become 'managers'. The classic examples are police, nurses and social workers; if you want to carry on engaging with people, you can't accept promotion. In IT being a contractor often offers the opportunity to stay coding - though at the cost of long term stability in employment. Large organisations may have the space and sense to recognise that the geek over there knows stuff that they need to have on tap, but sadly the temptation is to assume that modern technology renders the knowledge obsolete; outsourcing is an experiment based on this hypothesis...

Re:No

[ShanghaiBill]

companies have moved from offices and cubicles to giving everyone one or two meters of desk space sitting face to face and side to side of each other

Can you cite any actual evidence that open offices are more prevalent today?

My experience has been the exact opposite. I worked as a programmer in a bullpen in the 1970s, a cubicle in the 1980s, and a real office ever since. Apple is famously moving in the wrong direction, but I don't think that is typical. I am aware of several companies that switched to quiet offices with walls.

Also, as an old geezer, I have never felt discriminated against, and I have never felt that my age or experience was a handicap. I am open to learning new skills, and often start using new tech before the younglings, but I love it when a 20-something learns about an elegant tool from a more civilized age.

Re:No

[PPH]

adapt with the times

Been there. Seen too many instances of Language Du Jour come and go. I don't want to split the office into the tabs vs spaces warring camps. I don't want to incorporate some state of the art 3D gaming graphics engine into our simple engineering app interface. And I don't need every inter-office communication in PowerPoint.

Retaining older workers is easy

[ErichTheRed]

I'm 42, so I think I officially qualify as old. Yet, here I am still doing senior-level engineering work. I'm not a DevOps ninja (yet...) and don't code 16 hours a day, but I really enjoy my job. I'm hoping for the day that more employers will see that older workers who are still contributing aren't a drag on the company they work for -- they're the adults that are needed to redirect some of the "bright ideas" and temper them with reality and experience. Unfortunately, we're a society that worships Silicon Valley wunderkinds and 24-year-old CEOs, and even boring old school companies are trying to behave like web startups. So here's my suggestions -- companies shouldn't try too hard; if they do even some of these things they will retain talented older workers:

• Like the article says, have a technical track people can move along. Before my company implemented an "official" parallel career track for skilled technical people, lots of older people were "promoted" into management. It was the only place to go if you wanted to continue up the career ladder. This works great in traditional paper-shuffling corporate work, but IT, science, R&D, etc. is work that people actually don't mind doing and some of us would rather continue doing so. Traditional corporate jobs tend to promote people out of work, and most people are happy for this because who wants to shuffle paper? But, technical work and managerial work are _not_ related, not even close. The alternative for promotion on the technical track (at least for me) is being trusted with greater responsibility and helping with developing our junior staff. This (IMO) is a much better use of my skills than a management job would be.
• Understand that older workers can't live at work. It's not a sign of disloyalty or laziness to put in a reasonable amount of hours. Most older workers don't want to continue their college dorm days and live at an office with their co-workers. The way I manage it (with a huge volume of work) is to stay reasonably productive during the actual workday so I don't have to spend 13 hours a day at the office. Many older workers have kids and families, but it's also not the 1950s anymore where the husband was the sole breadwinner and would do anything the company told them to keep their job.
• Be flexible! This is one that gets major flak from the vocally child-free crowd and the younger set who have fewer out-of-work responsibilities. I have 2 kids, and the shorter work commute between my wife and I, so I do a lot of school activity appearances and other things during the day. But, I also regularly do the odd task for an hour or two after the house goes to bed. The company I work for gets plenty of work out of me; it's just not all in contiguous blocks.
• Lay off the preschool workplace furniture a little bit. Most older workers can be trusted with a little personal space. Most of us also don't want to attend meetings sitting on orange and blue beanbag chairs against a bright white wall. Have a mix of traditional office space and Millenial preschool office space -- our company does because we tend to skew older. Not everyone is happy with open plan offices and for some people (like me) they can be productivity killers.
• Appoint older workers as informal trainers. This is part of my job, and I'm actually someone who enjoys doing it. If you can convince your older workers that there aren't a bunch of MBAs waiting to lay them off as soon as the younglings' training is complete, this is a great way to pass on institutional knowledge. For this to work though, you have to provide...
• Job security. I'm not talking union-level or tenure-level "we can't fire you for any reason", I'm just talking about dialing back the outsourcing/offshoring/layoff drama a little bit. I would (and have!) taken a lower salary to work somewhere that is more stable than your average web startup. Older workers with families want an income they can count on. Part of that is up to us (by keeping o

Re:Retaining older workers is easy

[Teun]

Spot on, when I turned 60 I became a full time mentor and instructor for the newly hired engineers.
It's a win-win for all, the new guys don't have to repeat the stupidities of the past, I get exposed to some of the new tech they bring out of university and the company keeps the good parts of its proven production methods yet advances with the new hires.
The older workers can be an effective glue between existing products, future developments and management.

Re: I've been making this argument for 20 years

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I overwhelmingly prefer to work for companies whose reason for existence is the development of software or hardware. If you work for a bank, there's exactly one track for advancement: management. If you work for a company like Google or AMD, you can advance as a non-management subject-matter expert.

The HARD part about being a SME is REMAINING a SME. N
Seven years ago, I was a fairly experienced Android developer, but ended up taking a side-trip into ethical hacking for a couple of years. Eventually, I decided I was happier creating cool new shit than tearing shit apart & destroying it, so I went back into Android development... and got my ass totally *kicked* for almost two years before I felt competent again.

When I dropped out of Android development, ICS existed... but *depending* on it would have literally eliminated ~94% of existing devices as a market. So I had to get up to speed on things like Fragments. Then there was this "ActionBar" thing, which somehow involved AppCompat-v4. And learning how to use Android Studio instead of Eclipse. Plus, there were lots of things related to threads & IPC that you could get away with in older versions of Android (e.g, using Java's TimerTask instead of Android's AlarmManager, or abusing BroadcastReceivers instead of using Loopers & Handlers).

And... right around the time I started feeling competent again, Google threw Gradle & Marshmallow at us. Gradle was the worst one, because it single-handedly broke pretty much every older project on GitHub & SourceForge that wasn't being actively maintained (making learning by interactively playing with existing code ENORMOUSLY harder, because Android Studio deprecated non-Gradle projects at a point when its ability to autoconvert old non-Gradle projects was still badly broken). For a formerly-experienced developer still getting back up to speed with modern Android, Gradle was a *major* roadblock. Marshmallow compounded the barriers by making radical changes to the old permissions model... especially if you'd formerly danced around it by just storing everything on /sdcard or /sdcard-ext.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the development universe, Java 8 pulled Lambda expressions seemingly out of nowhere (thank sweet black baby JESUS Android didn't support them until I'd gotten back to the point where I'd already gotten back up to speed with Android... being forced to deal with lambdas simultaneously with Android 4 & 5, Android Studio, and Gradle would have probably pushed me over the edge & ended my career in Android development.

At the web-dev end, I just had to concede defeat & scale back by professed skills to "web services". CSS-1 existed and was used 15 years ago, but CSS 2 & 3 were something that largely existed only on paper... not even Firefox supported more than a meaningless, tiny subset of CSS 2. CSS 3? You're dreaming. Ajax went from something used in exotic, niche apps to something a fucking blog page was expected to use (and IMHO, was generally used excessively & inappropriately... but try telling that to employers who only know "it's the new big thing"). Struts 2 was killed dead by intractable security problems, and Struts 3 got shoved aside by Spring (god HELP anyone trying to newly get into J2EE & Spring NOW... it makes Microsoft MFC circa 2006 look tame & approachable by comparison).

That said... the changes to PHP were pretty nice. It's a proper OO language now, and MVC doesn't feel like something awkwardly tacked on with staples & duct tape.

My point is to illustrate just how easy it is to fall off the cart, and go from "expert" (or at least, "tolerably-competent") to "commerciably-unemployable without major, wholesale re-learning" in just a few years... especially in areas (web development, in my case) where you're more marginal to begin with.

Once you fall off the cart, it's REALLY hard to get back on. When you're a junior programmer, you tend to pick projects that are within

Re:No

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I am open to learning new skills, and often start using new tech before the younglings, but I love it when a 20-something learns about an elegant tool from a more civilized age.

Interesting. I'd say the biggest difference between 20-year-old me and 30-year-old me was probably was that 20-year-old me wanted to learn All The Things, while 30-year-old me was a lot more choosey about where limited time was spent.

I find bleeding edge technologies interesting, but I only rarely spend much time on something that is still in its early adopter phase any more. Consequently, I often am a little behind the enthusiastic youngsters in adopting new tech.

However, if you look at how effectively I use the new skills and technologies that I do adopt, or the proportion of the new skills and technologies I adopt that remains useful in the long term rather than quickly becoming obsolete, older me does much, much better than younger me.