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Will Millennials Be Forced Out of Tech Jobs When They Turn 40? (ieeeusa.org)
dcblogs shared an interesting article from IEEE-USA's "Insight" newsletter:
Millennials, which date from the 1980s to mid-2000s, are the largest generation. But what will happen to this generation's tech workers as they settle into middle age? Will the median age of tech firms rise as the Millennial generation grows older...? The median age range at Google, Facebook, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple and Adobe, is 29 to 31, according to a study last year by PayScale, which analyzes self-reported data... Karen Panetta, the dean of graduate engineering education at Tufts University and the vice president of communications and public relations at the IEEE-USA, believes the outcome for tech will be Logan's Run-like, where age sets a career limit... Tech firms want people with the current skills sets and those "without those skills will be pressured to leave or see minimal career progression," said Panetta...
The idea that the tech industry may have an age bias is not scaring the new college grads away. "They see retirement so far off, so they are more interested in how to move up or onto new startup ventures or even business school," said Panetta. "The reality sets in when they have families and companies downsize and it's not so easy to just pick up and go on to another company," she said. None of this may be a foregone conclusion. Millennials may see the experience of today's older workers as a cautionary tale, and usher in cultural changes...
David Kurtz, a labor relations partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, suggests tech firms should be sharing age-related date about their workforce, adding "The more of a focus you place on an issue the more attention it gets and the more likely that change can happen. It's great to get the new hot shot who just graduated from college, but it's also important to have somebody with 40 years of experience who has seen all of the changes in the industry and can offer a different perspective."
The idea that the tech industry may have an age bias is not scaring the new college grads away. "They see retirement so far off, so they are more interested in how to move up or onto new startup ventures or even business school," said Panetta. "The reality sets in when they have families and companies downsize and it's not so easy to just pick up and go on to another company," she said. None of this may be a foregone conclusion. Millennials may see the experience of today's older workers as a cautionary tale, and usher in cultural changes...
David Kurtz, a labor relations partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, suggests tech firms should be sharing age-related date about their workforce, adding "The more of a focus you place on an issue the more attention it gets and the more likely that change can happen. It's great to get the new hot shot who just graduated from college, but it's also important to have somebody with 40 years of experience who has seen all of the changes in the industry and can offer a different perspective."
Every generation thinks it will be the exception. Gen-X techies were computer literate. We were around when the internet went mainstream. We were sure that Tech was going to grow up with us - but lots of Gen-X'ers found themselves on the wrong side of 40. Some got to hang around, but most moved on. The same will happen to the millennials, replaced with those born after 2000. Younger is cheaper.
Unless they need beaten with a clue by four, no. Forced out by an H1B from a shitty company, maybe. That has nothing to do with age though.
Clickbait story is clickbat.
Then its OK.
Just don't discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender. That's off-limits.
The answer is no, millennials will not even forced out of tech jobs at the age of 40.
Now stop trolling and talk about something important, like North Korea's nuclear test and their claims it was a hydrogen bomb that can fit on an ICBM.
Surprise surprise, I didn't expect that to happen, but a large company just recruited me.
And I'm not even the oldest one they recruited, the oldest one was over 60. In fact, in our group of 20 people just newly recruited, every age group imaginable was represented, everyone from 19 to 60+ and inbetween.
I'm still kinda surprised by that, pleasantly surprised - but quite surprised. Guess there's a lot of common misconceptions about age discriminations.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Computationally intense and arithmetically challenging positions will value experience. 'On the Ground' engineers whom work on the leaf ends of the spectrum (SREs) may start to be eclipsed unless they stay on top of the newest tech. There is however a move to push out older workers where I am however, but then again, these are folks whom are all about 'windows ce' and had trouble as the company geared towards android and Linux on our embedded devices. They didn't want o budge without 'training', and management switched around and decided they needed to go. Millennials already see the writing on the wall so it can be different. However, as stated in the article, once you have a family and settle down, you become less flexible to change and begin to enjoy 'routine'. This is the trap they need to avoid to stay relevant on new technology and paradigms while accruing valuable experience across them all.
I don't read AC
Outside that shit hole of garbage where they want young people to shove in the meat grinder this maybe the case. Outside of SV, I've seen more senior people fought after because they don't make junior mistakes. SV loves young people because they'll work 90 hour weeks and not think twice. Older established folks want a normal work week but can put out a better product.
Over half of those companies are very young, Apple and Adobe being the outliers. If they hired young, their workforce will still be young. The numbers themselves do not say that older people are being forced out.
At least half of those companies also experienced phenomenal growth in recent years. There is a good chance that a subset of the early employees could afford to leave the company (stock options, rapidly being promoted, etc.). Those who were stuck in dead end positions had plenty of examples to encourage jumping ship for better opportunities. Again, age statistics alone cannot tell us much on that front.
Of course, simply reporting the median age alone does not say much about the age distribution. It implies a normal distribution, which is where I suspect the 40 year old figure comes from, yet that may be misleading.
These self-centered brats will lead the world into war. There hasn't been a more divisive, uncompromising generation in a long time. They put their ideologies above ethics and use tolerance and inclusiveness as a weapon.
A nice young brain can make up for a lack of experience and understanding.
On the other hand, it's hard to find something worse than a young, enthusiastis idiot.
For an older person, they really need to know their stuff.
Hiring is not about filling slots with warm bodies. It is supposed to be about getting the job done.
The odds are, there will be work for folks who are really good at what they do.
The other side of that is if you are just getting an engineering degree to get by, plan to retire early.
I think we are do for another big tech bubble bursting.
I mean really where has the innovation in tech been lately. What can I do online that I could not do in 2010? The only thing that is really new in the last decade or so is the "gig-economy". Basically its a bunch of permutations of GPS/Cellphone apps stapled to Mechanical Turk. Out of that you get Uber, Waze, variations on food delivery and bike sharing, and some other stuff like Takle and dating apps.
If you ask me none of that has to much of a future, well maybe the dating apps. It pretty much is just taking advantage of the fact we have a large population of economically displaced persons who are desperate enough to scratch out an existence doing odd jobs for strangers online. That pretty much fails no matter which way the U6 ticks, if unemployment and uncertainty rise, people will go back to doing their own stuff and staying home, the gigs dry up, if the U6 goes down people will go back to looking for steady jobs with predictable wages.
Really pure tech is a waste of time right now. Which is why Google, Apple, etc are getting into industrial supply trying to work out how to provide self driving components to auto makers.
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When the CEO of my company said in an all-hands meeting that the company would focus on hiring younger engineers, I decided to leave voluntarily, seeing that I would quickly become a target.
Sure enough, in the months since then, they've started forcing out the "old" guard though hostile working practices and punitive performance reviews.
I studied engineering because I loved the art, but our culture has destroyed the art of technology. I don't miss working in tech at all, but I do enjoy teaching high school math and science (my new career), and doing whatever I can to discourage students from pursuing a career in it.
At least the older guys and girls are aware that the work they are doing on is not new and can focus on producing better code.
When you think about automation, and replacing humans with artificial intelligence. Its pretty clear to me that this generation and the next face their own demise by their peers and themselves. I'm in my 50's and already see the writing on the wall for these folks. The only hope for these generations down the road is make you money early and retire.
Because people keep expanding the definition of "millennial" to the point where it now means pretty much everyone under the age of 35.
Outside of SV, I've seen more senior people fought after because they don't make junior mistakes.
The ONLY time I've seen old farts keep their jobs was because they did legacy shit like DOS programming. A lot of companies milk their products till the very end.
Now, when the company switches to something a bit more modern? The old fart is laid-off during a "restructuring" and when he hits the job market, low and behold, he "doesn't fit into the corporate structure", "doesn't have the skills" or hears nothing at all when he applies.
My experience is NY and Metro-Atlanta.
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You will be harvested and rendered into Soylent for the next generation of tech workers to consume.
Of course the answer to this question is "no," because that would be illegal. However, they will leave on their own once the company starts treating them like dirt, promoting 20-somethings above them, giving them menial, uninteresting work, and other things that will make them want to leave.
... and I'm still gainfully employed. What's more I have coworkers who are devs and in their 50s. Granted, I don't work in Silicon Valley or even the U.S. so maybe things are different here...
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In the last 15 years, since I started working as a software developer I more than tripled my pay. Now I am 40. I either need to find new roles to justify my pay, or very soon I will be the guy that is let go when the company wants to hire the next wonderkid.
Honestly, I am not sure I can do that. I am not in the top 5% of my age (experience) group, so I do not think I'll (or I want at all to) be promoted to management or other more managerial roles.
This situation is totally independent of what generation I belong to: at some point, we all be 40.
This will happen to "Y", "milennials" and who knows what comes next.
My only hope is that there will not be enough wonderkids on the marked, which (given the current trends in the demographics of where I live) is a fair assumption.
Who says time does not change never read any article about Generations.
Millennials, which date from the 1980s to mid-2000s
So now Millennial generation started in the eighties ? WTF, lets do math -
Baby boomers - 1945-1964, this seems to never change.
Gen X should be - 1965 to 1985, I have heard all kinds of end dates for this generation with the earliest 1980, 15 year generation ? Guess they grew up fast
Gen Y - Did these people disappear ? Gen Y, using consistent math, would have been born between 1985 - 2005. The new forgotten generation I guess
So this leaves 2005 - 2025 for Millennials
But I guess these type articles only proves that people forget math and even whole generations when writing about various generations to prove a point.
out.
Engineers in their 40s are pushed toward marketing or management, but there are 10 engineers for every one of those jobs. And that insight and perspective that an older engineer can provide can be provided by one engineer. You don't need 20 of them on the payroll.
Engineering is fine work while you're younger, but you should be working toward your second career by the time you're 30.
I left engineering (or shall I say, engineering and I parted ways?) when I was in my mid 40s. I went back to school for 6 years and became a dentist. That's a field where most patients prefer to see an older person...
Suck it up buttercups deal with it like Gen X'ers had to.
Everyone is forgetting that the future will be one of severe labor shortage. The boomers will be retiring and dying in droves. More people will leave the job market than the number entering it.
Are they going to want to spend time with family? Buy bigger houses? Be able to afford recreation? Live better as they advance in their career? Then, yes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yes.
Look how all of those young folks actually work in those companies. Big open rooms, long tables, everyone shoulder to shoulder. No privacy. An 'agile'/code-mill environment with long hours. It actually looks a lot like the industrial revolution, but with air conditioning and good pay. I'm over 40 and I don't actually want to work like that. I started the interview process at one of those big name silicon valley companies and decided that it wasn't actually for me. I interviewed at another place that clearly didn't hire people over a certain amount of experience; it was obvious that the hiring manager saw me as competition rather than an asset.
Its okay, there are other places to work. I stopped coding and I'm much happier.
I've been making good money in tech. With a modest lifestyle and modest retirement, I'm set to retire at 42. Plenty of time to do my own hobby pursuits.
Fact is, if being forced out makes you panic, then you've been trying to keep up with the Joneses. You should have a lot of money saved up by 40.
I first had to face this problem back when the only online forum for discussing it was Usenet, which had no visibility with the general public whatever. Fortunately, I found an underserved market of fellow Boomers who, suddenly finding themselves adrift in a digital future beyond their comprehension, needed people other than the condescending pups at Geek Squad who could guide them in applying today's tech to their daily lives.
It starts with their need to personally start applying the software they have had contact with only at the office to work on taxes or get started with that long-dreamed-of novel. Boomers don't share their grandchildren's obsession with social media, but they find themselves needing to apply it for their families, clubs and political organizations. And once they find out that the tiny computer in their pocket has multiple uses that integrate with each other, there's no stopping them.
I went back to school for 6 years and became a dentist. That's a field where most patients prefer to see an older person...
Older yes, but not old.
I'm not sure age has much to do with it if you are 'good'. I'm 38 years old, been running my own tech company since 2000/2001. (We are small - 7 employees). We hired a really talented guy in his early 20's a couple months ago. More than satisfied with his work to say the least, and he was pretty good with the customers. I was more than satisfied with his tech capabilities, but didn't always work things out logically I found, missing the target - but he'll learn over time. Sadly, had to let him go this week, he could never arrive on time - and you could never, not once, get a hold of him on his mobile/email/etc during or after hours. I'm not talking 5 minutes late to work, I'm talking hours late to work, 4 out of 5 days a week - every week. WORK ETHIC COUNTS. I have shown up to work on zero hours sleep, hung over, etc - on-time and still effective. Same goes with the rest of the staff. People who know their stuff and are willing to learn will last forever. I have no age biases. I have a guy nearing retirement working for us for the past 8 years, and for the past 3 years I have a 21 year old (started 19 - still in school). Be a productive employee and keep learning & adapting - you'll last forever........ IF your workplace is not comprised of short sighted douche bags (or the environment is 'too' corporate).
"Engineering is fine work while you're younger, but you should be working toward your second career by the time you're 30." Good luck with that if you graduated in 09
You guys and girls are so fucked, the older you get the less the capitalists want you and it has been going on all my life. You are welcome.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Not true, the average age at Google has increased a lot.
Or so said the CEO of a Fortune 100 company during an employee meeting just a few years ago.
It is no exaggeration to say that almost every one of them harbors Stalin in their soul.
The AARP must have an IT department. Perhaps they hire us over-the-hill types.
The ads there blatantly specify age ranges they want. The US looks like a paragon of equality compared to Mexico.
Tech firms want people with the current skills sets and those "without those skills will be pressured to leave or see minimal career progression,"
Engineers who fell into the job because they're insanely curious and constantly looking for new things to learn because that's what they love to do will be just fine. As always. My mom was in her late 40s when they said "hey, you're the sysadmin for this new DEC thing we bought now. Here's the manual!", and she thrived at it because it was challenging and interesting.
Engineers who got compsci degrees because their parents pushed them into it because "it pays well" will continue to steer into management. As always. We all people like this who self-selected into PM roles ASAP, not because they particularly loved PMing but because the writing was on the wall.
(Note: you can absolutely be a top-notch first-definition engineer and manage, and you can be an in-it-for-the-money engineer who somehow makes it to retirement while writing code, but I contend those are outliers.)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Many of them decide to "pursue their dream" in political rally attendance, gathering Facebook likes, and taking up a new "career" in gathering degrees for a career in tapestry preservation for which there are no actual jobs, and attending weekly therapy for "organizational training and gender empowerment", all of whose current and former attendees rely on their families for a roof over their head and food on the table.
If I sound bitter, I am. Guess who's supporting a whole *family* of in-laws, several of whom started in tech but went off to "pursue their dream" at my family's expense because we had to take them in when their "career" had no actual paying work. I love my spouse and like her family a lot, but dear *lord* I wish one of them would get a job. And do not get me *started* on the millennials who decided to pursue their dream of spending their entire day making the workplace a "safe space" and found out they forgot to earn a living in the process. Or the ones like Leah Rowe, who went off the rails on the FSF being transphobic about someone *else* and almost killed the Libreboot project in the process. Yup, that gender liberation really helped *her* career in the tech world.
In my experience, the majority of people going to see dentists are middle aged and older people. Younger people have a tendency to let their teeth go until something hurts. Middle aged people and older people prefer to see someone with gray hair working on their teeth than some kid right out of school. Middle aged people and older people are also more likely to have insurance, not that that really matters, but a lack of dental insurance keeps a lot of younger people away from dentist offices. A recent ADA study found that the cost of dental insurance is higher for most people than the cost of going to the dentist and paying out of pocket (surprise!). For some reason people prefer to pay insurance companies more than they are willing to pay the dentist to actually do the work that's required.
I think it's interesting that the insurance companies have got people thinking that insurance = healthcare. That way the "debate" is about "healthcare" but the reality is that the debate is about corporate welfare to insurance companies. If the mainstream media ever stops calling it the "healthcare debate" and starts calling it what it is, we might make some progress toward universal coverage in this country. But as long as insurance = healthcare, people will be paying much too much for much too little.
There are plenty of jobs outside of being an IT Engineer, many of those remain technical. If it is not your career choice, do like you did and move into something else. Sure, there are 10 engineers for every manager. Architecture probably has 50-100 engineers under them, program development maybe the same, etc... If you grow and continue to provide value to a company, you probably will have a job regardless of your age.
As with _any_ job you won't be able to make a career doing 1 thing. You being a Dentist have to adapt to every customer, and if you want to run your own Dentistry and grow your company you need to learn marketing and branding in addition to new procedures, new equipment, understand staffing issues, understand training issues for staff, etc... So if you are working toward your own independent practice, you want into marketing and management whether you like it or not. Just not in IT.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Nope.
I'm in my late 40s and am still making a living with computers. I've been in the industry on and off for over two decades. The trick is to continually be willing to learn new technologies -- they don't care how old you are, but they won't hire you if the only thing you can code in is BASIC and 6502 assembly. (Hint: C++ and Perl are slowly going away, Python is still very much in vogue, Javascript and related frameworks is where all the growth is)
Since I took an extended sabbatical after the dot-com economy collapsed, working as an English teacher abroad, I became an open source developer to keep my skills and experience current. I had to work some pretty lousy jobs (bad pay, asshole bosses) to build up my professional experience again during the early 2010s great recession, but finally got a living wage in the mid 2010s and just got another raise by changing my employer this year.
> Not true, the average age at Google has increased a lot.
So has the role of those people. They're building on, or maintaining, an existing technology.
Being 47 and a software engineer I'd say it depends on you. At my age you should be directing people under you. I'm the lead engineer and the manager. I have a few people in their 20s under me. They frequently ask me for advice on programming. While I don't give a shit about web development or and places about Google I still keep up to date on programming languages. I also still write the bulk of code at our place. So saying you should have a new career and leave engineering after 30 like the above poster is just absurd.
Hi. Stay current. Stay wage competitive. Maintain strong work ethic. Be accountable.
If you do these things and you're still let go when you're older, it may be ageism. If you don't do these things, it may be something called a labor market.
A young architect convinced the boss, who stopped programming decades ago, that a bastardized MVC stack with lots of "service layers" that don't do anything useful is the way to go. It's a variation of the "magic Legos" fallacy. They couldn't give practical example of future uses, only buzzwords. It increases code size about 4x over what it would normally be.
The older devs realize it's bloated and that the extra layers are unlikely to pay off in the future, but the architect brownoses the boss well and we are stuck with a Rube Goldberg design. The other young devs don't know any different and realize the buzzword parts are good resume padding. It's now a typing contest, and the younglings will probably win it. Our days are numbered. I suspect the architect did it on purpose to control who is on the team, and doesn't really believe his own magic-Legos bullshit.
Table-ized A.I.
> Engineering is fine work while you're younger, but you should be working toward your second career by the time you're 30
I've met a lot of unemployed and unemployable people who've "switched career". Most of them burn through the money they failed to save while doing engineering within two years, and wind up living off their spouse or parents until they become permanent Facebook addicts and hangers-on at a string of local lesbian coffeehouses. Not that they're gay or straight, just that the coffeehouses put up with people who don't actually do anything real. And they're happy to run a business selling them $8 cups of "Grande, Iced, Sugar-Free, Vanilla Latte With Soy Milk"
This time is different.(tm)
on every one of these threads and it's just as nonsensical every time.
/.ers realize (or want to face) is that's a small percentage of tech jobs. The rank and file $70-$120k/yr tech jobs are what most of the folks here are going to settle into. You can train anybody to do those in about 4 years. Which coincidentally is the length of a college education.
Yes, for the absolute top end of tech, the math geniuses, you keep the guys around. What I don't think
For the vast majority you're not a snowflake, you're not special. You're replaceable. Young people are better value than you. This is why every civilization for thousands of years encouraged their youngung's to value the old. If you want a future in this world you better get some worker solidarity fast. Make sure the young guys know if they kick you to the curb they're next. Stop fighting among yourselves. Christ, Unionize already.
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Hope springs eternal. I'm not holding my breath though.
Let's not stop there either, let's force them out of their homes and countries as well. They can go live in Antarctica.
That's what is so funny about youngsters complaining about old farts. They have no idea how quickly they will become one, at which point they will be complaining about that, too. There is really only one thing old folks know that young folks do not: Youth does not last very long.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
of course, yet one needs to own their own computer company with several services and you should be okay.
Ageism is a fact in tech. I've experienced it first hand and saw it happen over and over. The data supports my anecdotal observations.
That's why I'm furiously opposed to the H1-B visa program, maybe the only issue where Trump and I have common ground. Not only on the salary issues but for manpower. If Silicon Valley would pay more and work a little at retaining older workers, I think their labor shortage would mostly evaporate.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
At 35 I've been in my second career for 7 years and it's Instrumentation & Controls Engineering. My previous first career was IT.
I'm just hoping that for my 3rd career I can this time pick something where offshoring and it's ilk isn't going to follow me there again.
I've known a lot of dentists and it was a stroke of luck that you went to dentistry school at the right time. Unlike the AMA's shrewd production of a steady stream of doctors, dentistry schools produce dentists in surges and almost have to close up shop between the surges due to oversupply (some actually do close down). The ADA is a good example of how a profession can have a guild and still fuck up their management of the field.
40's already too old. I'm gonna say more like low 30's.
Welcome to the shallow, superficial world that you Millenials have created for yourselves.
Right now I see younger generations trying to push out older programmers.
I can't wait for the grand irony when the next generation pulls the same prejudice organic matter.
When I was in my early twenties:
I didn't have a family to go home to.
I had no idea of work life balance.
I didn't know that those uncomfortable feelings were signs of anxiety.
The next new language didn't feel like yet another way of doing the same.
I stayed late easily.
I coded through the night.
Crunches were exciting.
9pm finishes meant getting to bars as friends has the party going.
I went home interested to learn the next cool new thing in my copious spare time.
I took BS in the workplace because I didn't "know my rights."
It was all worth it because my salary could double every 18 months.
In my 40s, I cost more than that twenty something who will work longer, with more current knowledge and complain less when they're asked for something heroic.
Yes, I have more pragmatic solutions. Yes, I can apply a greater breadth of knowledge. But it's hard to justify a greater salary for all those years of experience when someone younger and hungrier will do 80% of the quality for 150% of the hours and for 60% of the cost.
I can either:
Take a lower salary for my reduced competitiveness.
Hone my marketing of what I bring, to justify that cost.
Push myself to compete on equal grounds.
Push for laws to protect my aging class and require certain percentages like me.
Retrain out of the field into something that values experience like management.
Or bitch about how unfair it is. That I have people skills. God damn it, what is wrong with these people?! Why don't they value what I bring more than what they clearly, observably, do value more!
Younger is cheaper.
But not necessarily better value for money.
The trap is managers who don't understand the difference.
See also open office plans.
..unless they also suck at their job or are overpriced. If your salary is twice the entry level salary for your position, and you're only producing entry level work, you're gonna get canned, but not because you're old. You'll get canned because you're an idiot.
Is there any actual evidence of this pheromone on a large scale or just a bunch of anecdotes? I'm over 40 and it seems more likely to me that these people either never had the skills or haven't stayed relevant. The industry is fiercely competitive and everyone is struggling to find good talent. If you're passing over people because they are over 30 or 40 or whatever you are clueless and deserve what you get.
What language will we be rewriting everything in by then while not paying attention to a history of CS?
Millennials may see the experience of today's older workers as a cautionary tale, and usher in cultural changes
You mean younger generation considering input for their elder? That may happen after they matured enough, but that will be too late then.
You're correct in your point, but please stop with the "snowflake" and "cuck" trash. It wasn't funny or cutting when they did it. It's not better when you use it back at them. It's just dumb.
The world will be over by then. Caused by Millennials.
I somehow recall the number 42 having a certain significance as an answer to the wrong question. I can't possibly imagine how so many people who have read the books or seen the movie can't seem to figure out that 42 is the answer but don't realize that you're asking the wrong question.
:
:) Just kidding.
I am 42... and I know the right question to ask... if you want to build me a massive super computer as a gift, I would gladly accept.
The question is
Maybe I should simply leave it there and make you all build the computer and check back in a few million years
The question is : At what age do employers expect that you either know what you're doing or assume you'll never figure it out?
The answer is : 42 (well 40... but it doesn't quite fit the context of my description here).
When you're in your 20's it is assumed you don't know anything and you'll figure it out while you're going along. We'll take a gamble on you because you're cheap and you have more than enough energy to kick butt and take names.
When you're in your 30's, if you've managed to make the cut so far, then you have a job making stuff using the tools and methods you mastered in your 20's.
When you're in your 40's the tools have changed. Your education an experience is only relevant if you learn to use new tools to apply them to. For example, today, C or C++ developers aren't really interesting anymore in most jobs. Certainly not for application development. We will maintain the old code and we'll add features, but the number of projects which should be written in C or C++ is far less. We used those languages because they were really efficient and we could count clock cycles on them when that mattered. It doesn't anymore. Today, we're more interested in people who can code using more advanced languages which provide more portable and safer code.
To learn a new language to senior level proficiency takes a year or two of active use. It requires learning new libraries, ecosystems, management systems, build systems, etc... when we old-folk went to school in the 80's and 90's, multi-threaded programming was something for supercomputers and was a small topic in a single course. We were more focused on this being a future technology. We are now to the point where multi-threaded programming is a fact of life. We have established designed patterns, algorithms are understood and accepted for them. Of course, we are even moving past multi-threaded because language development has allowed far better solutions.
Consider this. Adding a compiler into your code in 1994 was not really an option. We might add a scripting language, but certainly not a compiler. This was because compilers were still very static tools built using painfully handcoded lexers and parsers and code generators. We had companies making entire livings by selling linkers like Blinker or RTLink. When I wrote a compiler back then, it was an agonizing process with poor programming patterns to support me. When I write compiler today, it may be an afternoon of work and it's a single class which I can embed in any project.
Why is this relevant? Because in the old days we were so focused on manual serialization of data, there was no language support and there was no accepted programming patterns for doing so. Even ten years ago, languages didn't offer good enough RTTI support for super-simple serialization of classes. These days, languages without those features are absolutely useless. This is because when we're performing IPC via REST, SOAP or otherwise, we want to simply pass a simple class instance to a RPC call method.
The main benefit of a modern tool/language is that when making use of lambdas in an advanced language (not C/C++), the lambda can be passed as code and then compiled in place to execute in-thread, across-threads, or across systems. This could only happen if we compiled the lambda in-place as needed. A single piece of code can have three (or more) ways of being executed. With good modern langu
Not many US citizen millennials in tech right now. Top grads from the past 10-15 years have mostly seen their applications thrown in the garbage while the tech sector rolled out the carpet for foreign nationals on H-1B and OPT visas.
..those who are computer literate anyways.
however, I have seen plenty of people go from the industry.
though, late 1980s and 90's people.. all I can say is good luck fellas. you can't just npm or get gems for everything - or rather you can but so can everyone else. ..I don't particularly care if google recomends sqlite it's still a frigging bad idea to take that recommendation and use it for a database as backend for your realtime ui... that's just an example, but the millenials just look up what "google" or someone recommends, never mind the context of the recommendation. they look for a solution already made - even fir the simplest of things. even a 1 liner needs to come from some repo or it is infeasible to use it. and then you wonder why 100 user services with 8 kbyte of actual data per user take gigabytes to run.
anyways back to the subject of age discrimination... it's not so much that. it's just that its very unlikely you would get same amount of pay you would in the '90s with the same skillset that you had in the '90s. installing operating systems is now a job basically comparable to working at mcdonalds for example, so you can't really expect 100k for doing that.. not because it's any easier it's just that a lot more people can do it - and this is from personal experience from what I saw in big corporations when I was growing up, the IT folks usually could do just basic things and were still getting paid fairly, ridiculously actually, high, despite basically only having the skills to read the manual/instruction booklets - oh only if I had been a little older..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I quit before I was fired,
Now I am going into civil service.
My replacement was my direct report, the upper level managers promoted him to my level without even asking me about his performance. I wouldn't have promoted him. He wasn't sharp enough. Yet they got him to my level for $20k less, have him work 7 days a week on set salary, and I saw all this coming. Now I am temporarily retired posting here to see how I can extract money from the very system that has been harvesting me for 22 years.
You gotta play hardball. Make sure you get your fair share of the worlk, bear your teeth, don't let supervisors and seniors who are you as a threat try to systematically weed you out, threaten to sue if it starts getting ugly, etc etc.
"...the outcome for tech will be Logan's Run-like, where age sets a career limit..."
That's the way it has already been for at least 15 years.
It's what happened to their parents. It's only fair
Stroke of luck? I started dental school in 2007, and they were telling us that it's going to be a buyer's market for dental practices when we graduate because more people were retiring than coming out of dental schools. Then the stock and real estate market melt-downs of 2008-9 happened and all those old dentists saw their retirement portfolios cut in half. They stopped selling their practices and retiring and instead hired just-out-of-school dentists and paid poorly because there were so many dentists and so few jobs. The pendulum is swinging the other way now, but there are more dental schools churning out more dentists all the time.
It's always hard to make a buck.
Can't wait until the 30 year old who refused to hire me because I was too old (made sure he gave other reasons for not hiring me) gets the same thing happening to him! After all I could and did manage and code changes to a word processor that ran in 16K by using self-modifying code.
your comment in the Subject line. Thank
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you!
Can we just prepare them for the age 40 (instead of 30) carousel?