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Almost Half of Tech Workers Worry About Losing Their Jobs Because of Ageism, Says Survey (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconBeat: More than 40 percent of tech workers worry about losing their jobs because of age, a new survey shows. Jobs site Indeed also found that 18 percent of those who work in the tech industry worry "all the time" about losing their jobs because of ageism. The release of the survey Thursday comes amid other news about diversity -- or lack thereof -- in tech workplaces. Often when we report about diversity issues, readers wonder about older workers. The Indeed survey offers insight into the age of the tech workforce: It's young. Indeed concluded from surveying more than 1,000 respondents in September that the tech workforce is composed of about 46 percent millennials, with 36 percent of respondents saying the average employee age at their company is 31 to 35, and 17 percent saying that the average worker age at their company is 20 to 30. What about Generation X and baby boomers? Twenty-seven percent of respondents said the average age of employees at their company is 36 to 40, while 26 percent of respondents said the workers at their companies are 40 and older.
Posting anon,.....
Living in Australia with over 250 to 300k per year immigration, we're seeing an incredible drop / stagnation in wages. If you're not a seriously skilled professional (admitedly, a reasonable percentage of /. posters but certainly in no way, all nerds and geeks) then you're in potential trouble.
We've got more and more and more people, willing to work for significantly less money. These people are accustomed to a poorer quality of life back home, so when they come here and share a house with 5 other people, they think it's a palace, but sounds like torture to us.
Plus you've got people who simply made a couple of bad choices skills wise or job wise, wound up in a role and found themselves simply with antiquated skills. I'm one of these myself. Yeah it my fault but my government is NOT making it easy. Wage stagnation is going on seriously for the middle class across the world.
We're getting boned.
... I've some experience with this.
Competition for IT jobs being what it is, I sometimes had to make a persuasive argument for hiring/keeping me as opposed to a young'n.
In brief, it went like this:
While recent grads know HOW to do stuff that I don't, I know WHY we shouldn't be doing it.
Business is not a good place to be experimenting by being an early adopter.
In skill comparisons, I got my first computer (TRS-80) in 1978. I speak DOS, lived the digital revolution, saw Windows 3.0 fail -- to be fixed by 3.1 -- helped bring in the first network for Mobil Oil, and grew up with the Internet and social media.
I had the experience that entry-level peeps would get later, at the company's expense.
It worked for 30 years.
I've been retired for 3 years, so I don't know if that approach would work today.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Get ready to change. There's lots of roles in IT that tend to prefer more experienced folks, the type of role where "Ya, I've seen that 5 times before, here's what we're going to do about it..." is the order of the day. Architectural roles of all stripes, infosec in general, etc. I've moved roles a few times in the last 25 years, (network monkey -> Mgmnt -> infosec -> infosec architecture) and I always find a new fun challenge every time I have.
You're probably in technology because you can adapt to change, not because you're scared of it. Embrace that.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I am nearly 50 and still in high demand. Most people my age just want to work 9 to 5 and go home. Unlike them I push myself to keep up with the latest tech and aggressively manage my career. The guys in their 20s wish they could do half of what I can accomplish. When hunting for jobs if some place rejects me due to age it probably was a lousy place to work in the first place. I only take jobs from firms that need someone who can just handle it all from Manager down to dev work.
You open up a different can of worm with population sets. Of course by skewing their employees younger, software companies can often make their employees more gender diverse faster than if they did not do that...
Older engineers are going to be more likely male. If you want to fix a "gender-diversity" problem in tech simply with new hires, you will likely find it to be pipeline limited. Interestingly, if you wanted to make faster progress than being pipeline limited, you can simply reduce the fraction of older engineers (who are more male dominated compared with the younger pool).
Sadly, that's two strikes against companies keeping older engineers, generally more expensive and generally more male.
My last layoff was at age 57 from a pretty large tech company. The severance package was reasonably generous. Then, in addition, there was the "Promise not to sue us for age discrimination" add-on severance package, which was... pretty dang good. And, it came with about an inch thick stack of statistics about the ages of those laid off, which kind of established they were more than ready to defend themselves against any age discrimination suits.
I signed. It was a pretty good chunk of change (three months' pay, I think I recall) paid extension of benefits ... and there was an email from recruiting from another company in pretty much the same business in my inbox when I got home, which is where I'm working now.
Cisco gave me three years pay with full benefits (health care coverage, 401k, and stock vesting). Severance packages still exist. It was an "early retirement" vs a "layoff" or "termination" ...for whatever that is worth. They paid us to go away.
the suits want a bunch of things:
- low pay for the worker bees
- abusable workforce with little experience to be able to say 'no, I wont work that weekend. I already worked too many in a row'
- energy level; I'll give the kids that; they have more energy, but there's a lot more to writing code than pure energy
- they are not set in their ways; so you can 'program' them to your culture, even if its a toxic culture
there are lots of reasons. the elephant in the room knows all this, but the media are not allowed to mention it (a third rail, don't touch!)
its amazing how few people know about this, outside of tech. I tell people all the time and they have a hard time believing me.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
My first layoff was in 2009. I was a couple years older than you. Typical storage industry downsizing. I'd been at the company just shy of 20 years. Oh well. At the time I thought it was the end of the world. I didn't know it but I had been stagnating. Three months later I was doing contract work on the east coast for considerably less pay, but vastly increased exposure to technology and problems and out-of-the-box thinking. Found that job through Craigslist, not Indeed or Monster. Two years after that I took an offer from the company that created the tools I had been supporting for the last 12 years. I worked in their professional services group, gaining even more exposure to unusual problems. and customers using the tools in unusual ways. That really broadened my knowledge. After 2 years that company did a 35% downsize. Out again. I ended up being an semi-independent consultant for a couple years, but trying to do that and provide daily care for a very sick wife was stressful and difficult. I interviewed with a friend of a friend and got a FT job with a big consulting company. By that point I had earned the label "subject matter expert".
So what am I saying? Don't give up hope. For me, every layoff has been a blessing in disguise. Each time I been able to broaden my skills, gain exposure to people and ideas, and learn to boldly go where no man has gone before.
It's not about what you know; it's about who you know, and who knows you. Go to Meetups. Stay in contact with people. Get your name out into the back channels.
One little trick to get your resume past the stupid HR filters. At the end of your resume add a section entitled "Software and products I've used or been exposed to:" and list every language you've written more than 1 line in, every technology and product you've used even if just once. Everything that you can legitimately claim to have been exposed to. Even if it was a demo. Now format that section in 1 pt font, white text. It becomes invisible in MS-WORD and in PDF, but the HR scanners care about content, not format. They will see all those magic buzzwords and your name comes out near the top of every search. It actually gets to be a pain when the endless Indian consulting firms begin matching you for every possible technology known. And now that that little trick is out there, it won't last long. Act appropriately, and good luck.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Here the other side. We had difficulty finding people. We did not want people who just left school, but where a bit more mature.
So we looked for older people from 55 and up. The fact that we would get extra money fro; the government in Belgium was a nice plus, but not the deciding factor.
Worst. Decision. Evar. It was almost impossible to get them to do anything they already knew. Let alone learn them anything new. Just not flexible enough and easily double the time to be somewhat productive (a year, instead of standard 6 months). And we really tried over several years. At a certain moment you just give up. They where just too expensive, even if they got the same pay as others.
The plus side? They are less sick on Monday and Friday. Less moaning about stuff. Much less drama. Yet the thing that remained was that learning new things was hard. Be it procedures or skills.
I now also see it with myself. I know that if I got fired now, getting a new job would be near to impossible. Too set in my ways, even if I WANT to be flexible and WANT to learn, it will be extremely hard if not impossible. Because I would feel as if they do not want to use my expertise.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.