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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.
Then its OK.
Just don't discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender. That's off-limits.
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
... 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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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.
It will be the same for Millenials as it is now for Gen X. Those with genuine ability will enter the highest paid portion of their career, and those who never grew professionally will be pushed out of the industry. Nothing new to see here.
Those who don't continue in IT have plenty of other options if their soft skills are developed. Those without soft skills or IT skills are the ones who come to Slashdot to complain about ageism.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
... 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.
Or worse, shooing them into middle management. That's the designated job for over-40s.
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'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).
You will be harvested and rendered into Soylent for the next generation of tech workers to consume.
That brings new meaning to the phrase 'Eat me!'
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"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.
It will be the same for Millenials as it is now for Gen X. Those with genuine ability will enter the highest paid portion of their career, and those who never grew professionally will be pushed out of the industry. Nothing new to see here.
Those who don't continue in IT have plenty of other options if their soft skills are developed. Those without soft skills or IT skills are the ones who come to Slashdot to complain about ageism.
Exactly....
What I have seen happening is that most that thrive tend to become technical architects, then project managers, then IT management. Those that stay in a core technical job are experts that are knowledgeable in multiple areas, leaders (even though they may not be in a management position), and enjoy pushing the boundaries of what technology can do (change agents).
Those that are forced out tend to be "stuck" in their position (i.e. do not have the skills or interest to grow further).
Not true, the average age at Google has increased a lot.
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?
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.
_Excellent_ for you and your crew. I do wonder if you'll feel quite the same way in several decades, when you realize a senior engineer was born _after_ you started in the field. It's a strange experience, one I can attest to personally.
I've been very fortunate to work with mentors, and to mentor, people of various ages in my decades in technology. There are many valid reasons for age bias: the generally better medical condition of younger workers is one of them. Knowledge of the latest technologies, and excitement rather than hard-won cynicism about them, can lead to exciting development in leading edge fields. Conversely, hard-learned caution about promises of incredible improvements, or knowledge of the the failures of the last attempt, can speed development and prevent catastrophic losses. The "best practices" learned over decades of productive work can be invaluable, even company saving or life saving.
One of the most difficult problems I've had with younger colleagues is that we train them, and they _leave_. We don't necessarily have enough work in our team for another senior expert, even if we helped create them. We've had good success cross-pollinating with partners and clients, hiring from each other's teams people who'd be better suited for an ongoing role with the other group.
These employment shifts are not always a promotion. There have been people who got in over their heads, and needed to downgrade to a more limited role to _do_ good work and stay employed. There have also been lifestyle choices as people needed stable money or a stable home life for family, or had medical needs, and those were demotions in some cases. Those also worked out better when they switched company.
I'm old enough, myself, to see the point in my mental capacity to produce _new_ tools efficiently.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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
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.
I have shown up to work on zero hours sleep, hung over, etc - on-time and still effective.
Your definition of effective is incorrect.
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.
Why are you writing them checks? I've helped out my in-laws quite a bit, but that was after they spent years taking care of me and my wife when we were young and poor. Her brother? He's on his own.
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
..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 understand all of this, except one: Why do you need to get hold of him after hours?
Just curious.
Here in (Socialist) Belgium he would have been fired as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
I hear you... honestly.... I chose something of a mix. I come from a background of being a key developer on 3 separate billion user products. I have been a real programmer for years. I've written compilers, operating systems, network stacks, web browsers, video codecs, audio codecs, protocol stacks, large scale state machine management systems, etc... honestly, I've managed to always have the absolute most fun jobs in programming most of my life.
:)
Then I had a family and found out I needed more money to maintain my preferred life style... which is pretty much swipe the card, if there's money left good... if not... transfer from another account and be more careful for a few days. So I left being a programmer.j.. kinda.
I entered Cisco Networking and studied 18 hours a day 6 days a week and 10 hours a day on the 7th for 3 months straight. Videos, books, etc... I pretty much just memorized everything I would need to enter the networking industry as a senior level engineer with a senior level salary.
My salary doubled.
Since then I've been travelling the world working for the Bank of Spain, the US DHS, the US Navy, the Norwegian Prime Minister's office, Cisco themselves, NATO, Bank of Denmark, the Norwegian Stock Exchange, Telia Sonera, Telenor, Sainsbury UK... quite a few really.
I loved it... then I got bored. Been there done that. Filled up two passports in 5 years... saw the world. Even used my frequent flyer miles to travel around the entire world business class with the kids on summer.
Now I'm a programmer again. I'm taking what I learned from networking and being in key positions in some of the world largest networking projects and I'm writing code to automate it... in Powershell.
This is the funny thing. I'm actually writing code for Powershell. To be fair, I can be a real programmer in any language... I even wrote a proper recursive descent parser for a C like language in Powershell itself. It was absolutely entertaining.
The fact is, people were willing to pay EXTRA for Powershell because Powershell is a command line and people aren't scared of command lines. Everyone in IT looks at Powershell thinking "That's something I can do without becoming a programmer". Python scares the shit out of people.
Today, I'll do some grunt work with wrapping REST APIs in Powershell or C# and then later or tomorrow, I'll sit down and write an "AI algorithm" which will automatically draw as accurate of a network diagram as possible (guessing which switch should do what and how they should be configured) from just a net-list. I already figured out how to do it using old fashioned compiler optimization algorithms via AST reduction.
What's best is that being a Powershell programmer writing some scripts which does some networking apparently pays double or triple what a good operating system or web browser developer would make even though the OS/Browser developer has to be 10 times the programmer.
Can we just prepare them for the age 40 (instead of 30) carousel?
FTFY.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes