When I was a project manager I always preferred people with more experience. Sometimes that meant older developers, sometimes it just meant someone who had more experience with a particular infrastructure than anyone else, regardless of age.
The bigger brain drain I've seen, which is really troubling to me, is the outsourcing of everything IT. At first it was help desk type positions and low-level systems administration - stuff that could be done following a strict SOP. But more and more I see more senior development work, and even business analysis, being farmed out to contractors. The people who actually know the company and understand the business are being pushed out in favor of someone who *only* knows how to program, and who will be gone in a year as soon as he's learned about the company. The result is that systems are choppy, nothing integrates well, no one knows who to talk to anymore to get things done, etc.
Part of this outsourcing trend is that college recruiting is down. Instead of hiring college grads and training/mentoring them up, they're outsourcing all the entry-level positions and hiring only middle management to babysit them. Once those people move on/retire, who's going to run the place? It's a really troubling trend.
Ok full disclaimer, I'll turn 33 this weekend and despite all the trappings of adulthood (house, husband, kid, 11-year career), I hardly feel old and am constantly learning new things (including programming languages, even though I'm not a professional developer). But if you're really concerned that late 30's is way worse or something, consider this.
My dad died several years ago and left my mom with no income. His small business supported our household and for the previous few decades she had helped him run that business. Due to various boring details I won't get into, she had to sell the business when he died, and was left with no job and no marketable skills. She was 49.
She spent the next few years trying her hand at various things before settling into her current job. In the years between 49 and 60 (her current age), she learned: how to clean a house professionally (totally different than cleaning your own house), how to provide technical support answers for model-making tools and equipment (meaning she had to learn how they all worked), office management for two completely different industries, and finally library science. She is now head of circulation at her library and poised to potentially become director of the library someday.
So, age has nothing to do with it. Your brain is completely capable of learning new things at any age - in fact, constant learning can help stave off dementia when you actually do get old. But even if age had something to do with it, you are clearly not old. In other posts I've recommended various career moves instead of going back to programming, but if your actual question is "can I learn a new language despite my age", the answer is of course you can.
That's largely why I'm looking to move into the business side. I'm 33, with ten years of IT experience, mostly as a project manager (programming was never my thing but I understand enough to be able to work with developers). When they started offshoring all the developers, we kept the really good senior guys around. Then they started offshoring the senior development roles. They offshored testing. Now they are starting to offshore construction management and project management work. There is still a definite need for skilled senior engineers and architects to remain onshore and employed by the company, and the same goes for project managers, but I'm seeing the trend. My next career move will hopefully be to a technical-ish management position outside of IT.
It's really hard to move out of IT, because there is such a stigma that IT are "computer guys" and can't do anything else. But about five years ago I took a job supporting marketing applications and web sites. I got to take the training that marketing professionals got, I got to work closely with people in marketing and public relations. And now I'm fairly well situated to get a job managing web projects for a marketing department.
So, the moral of the story is that if you're interested in IT but worried about getting outsourced at some point, consider taking a role supporting a specific business area that you're interested in. Bonus points if you can get good at business analysis (requirements analysis, process engineering, etc. - these are real skills that take both training and experience to master, and are less likely to be offshored because they require proximity to the business). Then if you want or need to leave IT at some point, hopefully you'll have a few years of experience with that business area under your belt, which will make it easier to transition out.
I did IT project management and infrastructure support for ten years. What I saw was that people who truly preferred technical work to "management" type stuff, if they were good at it, would move into senior technologist roles. This could be senior developer, engineer, architect, etc. The type of work that your average 20-year-old code monkey can't do, because it requires a deep knowledge of many technologies. In those cases, expensive developers with lots of experience are generally preferable as long as they are willing/able to keep up with quickly changing technologies.
Some companies offer manager or even director-level positions that are primarily technical. Others top out the technical track at a "lead" type of position. The company I was at used to have senior directors who were purely technical and did no management whatsoever, but they all got laid off in the last few years.
The original poster, or the GP, could look into consulting firms as well. Often they prefer younger candidates who are able to travel all over the place, but the high-end firms that purport to offer in-depth technical advice for complex problems would probably love someone who's "seen it all".
And the reason I replied here in the first place is to second your "you can always learn a new language". I haven't programmed (besides html/css/js) in about twelve years, and a couple nights ago I was able to pick up enough in a couple hours to modify some jsps. Oh and a few months ago I wrote an app in php despite having never seen a single line of php code before that. Languages are easy, it's the principles that are hard.
I was one of the CS women that CMU lost (to another major). There were two key reasons - one was that, unlike high school, the assignments in college seemed completely useless and arbitrary to me. Solve the n-queens problem? It was boring and unengaging for me. The other problem was that it was very solitary. Sure you spent all your time in clusters with other students, but the work was mostly solo, and the workload made it difficult to socialize outside schoolwork. Spending all my time in a smelly, dank cluster didn't help either.
It really had less to do with discrimination (at least, not active discrimination) and more to do with the fact that CMU's CS program was just not structured in a way that interested me.
Slightly OT at this point, but my physics teacher in high school used a bell curve for our midterm exam. He took the highest score and made it 100, made the lowest score something just in the failing range, and distributed the rest such that most of the class got C's.
Women might enjoy chopping up a rake or two, but men's eyes grow wide and they get a funny grin whenever you start tossing in glow sticks, marbles, iPhones, and other fun things.
Really? I'm a woman and I thought the glow sticks were about the best one. The marbles were cool too. All the electronics gadgets just get reduced to black powder - boring after the first one.
I was excited to see if the pens resulted in a pool of inky goo, but most of that seemed to stick to the sides. Disappointing.
There was one where they were about to try a crowbar, then took it out and replaced it with something else. I didn't watch them with sound so I don't know why they did that, but it seemed pretty obvious the crowbar wasn't going to blend. Everything else went in about 30 seconds though!
Toyota's even better with dealership complaints. After a few years of everything from overly long service appointments, rude service, sexism (the only time I've ever experienced it was getting my car fixed - what a stereotype), and possibly fraudulent behavior, I wrote a letter to Toyota Corporate explaining some of the situations. The official stance is that dealerships are independent, but Toyota gave this dealership a special service award, so I thought they might want to know what really goes on there.
The response? A letter back thanking me for my inquiry into special deals and/or recalls, and informing me that there are no recalls applicable to my vehicle. I'm still confused about that one.
I found a much better dealership for service, and I love my Toyota, but I will not buy another one.
I was a CS major at CMU for my freshman year (1996). They interviewed me as a female CS student as part of research into why more women didn't do CS or stay with it (no idea if it was part of the research for the book though). I said I loved CS and didn't know why more women didn't do it. A year later, I was gone from the major. The main reason was that CMU's program is extremely intense and technical, which is fantastic, but you have to LOVE it to be successful at it. I just didn't love it enough to put in the kind of time it required. That, and I didn't like spending so much time sitting in clusters coding.
At the time part of their theory was that men like to get into the nuts and bolts of computers, studying them for what they are, whereas women like to study computers to figure out how they can be better applied to "real life". I don't know how true that is in general, but I'd definitely say that's a fair assessment for me.
After reading some of the posts below (and TFA), the criteria were very generic and didn't really capture true "wired-ness".
They also didn't get accurate info. for example, CMU absolutely allows personal web pages, nearly every student, professor, and class has one. You can run your own server, or use the school's network. There is a campus-wide file system. When I was there, every incoming freshman (humanities and all) was required to take a computer literacy course that included Unix and emacs. And students don't have access to Usenet? Things must have changed an awful lot in the past 4 years.
And things like requiring students to own a computer - CMU was the kind of place where you didn't have to require it, everyone did it anyway.
The more you look at it, the more it seems this study is just a way to get readers over to Forbes.com. Things like how connected a campus is really can't be determined with any accuracy by a handful of vague characteristics. Hopefully people will do their own research before making any decisions, since I'm sure there are many other great "connected" schools that didn't even make this list.
And what about CMU? A few years back they were considered way up there, if not #1. T1 to all the dorms by my freshman year (1996), wireless at big chunks of campus in 99, hell we had a robot that roamed the halls freely and took commands issued via a web site.
Perhaps in the past few years there has been less of a focus on technology than there used to be.
My high school's social structure didn't seem to discriminate rich vs. poor, popular vs. unpopular, etc. Instead, it almost seemed more a matter of smart vs. not-so-smart. This was the idea perpetuated by the administration. Coming from one of the top high schools in the country (Blue Ribbon if that means anything to you), the school was obsessed with academic excellence. We offered tons of AP programs, and if you were good enough to get in, it was a great school. But if you weren't, well, don't expect any special treatment from administration.
But, I had all the experiences described here. I had them much earlier, from around 5th to 7th grade. I was asked about my sex life in terms I didn't yet understand, I was called a bitch by people who didn't even know me. People would steal my friend's purse and put it in my locker so everyone, including the teacher, thought I stole it. I was seldom physically abused but that too happened to me.
The teachers and administration didn't support this behavior directly. They didn't dislike me for not "fitting in". In fact, I think they liked me because I was a good student (at least until the social pressure got to me). But they never did anything about it. They saw what the other kids did to me and never said anything. No one stepped in until my parents called the police, claiming I was being harassed. Even then, not nearly enough was done, and it only got worse for me.
But here's the thing. All this didn't happen to me just because I was smart. It didn't happen because I wore weird clothes. It happened, I believe, for two reasons: one, I was more mature than most kids at my age, and two, I didn't have the right material things. My town is wealthy, and so were my parents, but in an attempt not to spoil me, they didn't buy me a new wardrobe every month. I didn't have the latest stereo or Nintendo system, I didn't watch the right TV shows all the time, etc.
I just didn't fit in. It wasn't because I was smart; a lot of popular and bitchy kids went on to great colleges and art schools, and spent just as much time in AP classes as I did. It was because I just couldn't understand how to fit in. I was shy, and that was perceived as being antisocial. I was mature, and couldn't figure out why things like idle gossip were so intriguing.
I think the horrors described here are very real. I don't think it's because we're smart or choose to be different (some of the most popular kids in my school were very strange). I think it's because we just weren't able to fit in and be accepted, possibly because we had our minds on other things, more important than popularity. And that is maturity in my book, not intelligence. (Money is also a factor- it's hard to be popular in middle school and high school years if you can't dress the part.)
Black trenchcoats do not kill people. TV does not kill people. Video games, even Quake, do not kill people. The Internet does not kill people. People kill people.
The shooters were obviously not entirely sane; I'd venture that they were psychotic and probably paranoid. But psychology theory indicates that while people are usually predisposed to some psychological condition, that condition is triggered by some stressor. Enough has been said here about the horrors of high school life (for me, it was Middle School) that I don't have to elaborate. Those nightmares would push anyone to the edge. The shooters, tragically, got pushed over the edge.
So where does the blame fall? Well, were these kids several years younger I'd have to blame the parents. But, the actions of someone in high school have to be attributed to that person and no one else.
So what made them do it? I'm guessing it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet or gaming, which actually help relieve stress in most of us who partake in such activities. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that it probably wasn't the black outerwear either.
Most likely, they were already mentally disturbed, and instead of getting treatment they had to endure the trials of social life in high school. I'm in college now, and very thankful I didn't kill myself or end up in jail, because things are better. But while I was in middle school, I didn't think things would ever change. There was no end in sight for the torture I got every single day.
Bottom line- mix troubled people with a cruel, unforgiving, and nonunderstanding societal structure, make them think it will go on forever, and you get two psychotic suicidal killers. Sadly, I'm not at all surprised this happened.
My deepest sympathies go out to the friends and families of the deceased and injured.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a project manager I always preferred people with more experience. Sometimes that meant older developers, sometimes it just meant someone who had more experience with a particular infrastructure than anyone else, regardless of age.
The bigger brain drain I've seen, which is really troubling to me, is the outsourcing of everything IT. At first it was help desk type positions and low-level systems administration - stuff that could be done following a strict SOP. But more and more I see more senior development work, and even business analysis, being farmed out to contractors. The people who actually know the company and understand the business are being pushed out in favor of someone who *only* knows how to program, and who will be gone in a year as soon as he's learned about the company. The result is that systems are choppy, nothing integrates well, no one knows who to talk to anymore to get things done, etc.
Part of this outsourcing trend is that college recruiting is down. Instead of hiring college grads and training/mentoring them up, they're outsourcing all the entry-level positions and hiring only middle management to babysit them. Once those people move on/retire, who's going to run the place? It's a really troubling trend.
Ok full disclaimer, I'll turn 33 this weekend and despite all the trappings of adulthood (house, husband, kid, 11-year career), I hardly feel old and am constantly learning new things (including programming languages, even though I'm not a professional developer). But if you're really concerned that late 30's is way worse or something, consider this.
My dad died several years ago and left my mom with no income. His small business supported our household and for the previous few decades she had helped him run that business. Due to various boring details I won't get into, she had to sell the business when he died, and was left with no job and no marketable skills. She was 49.
She spent the next few years trying her hand at various things before settling into her current job. In the years between 49 and 60 (her current age), she learned: how to clean a house professionally (totally different than cleaning your own house), how to provide technical support answers for model-making tools and equipment (meaning she had to learn how they all worked), office management for two completely different industries, and finally library science. She is now head of circulation at her library and poised to potentially become director of the library someday.
So, age has nothing to do with it. Your brain is completely capable of learning new things at any age - in fact, constant learning can help stave off dementia when you actually do get old. But even if age had something to do with it, you are clearly not old. In other posts I've recommended various career moves instead of going back to programming, but if your actual question is "can I learn a new language despite my age", the answer is of course you can.
That's largely why I'm looking to move into the business side. I'm 33, with ten years of IT experience, mostly as a project manager (programming was never my thing but I understand enough to be able to work with developers). When they started offshoring all the developers, we kept the really good senior guys around. Then they started offshoring the senior development roles. They offshored testing. Now they are starting to offshore construction management and project management work. There is still a definite need for skilled senior engineers and architects to remain onshore and employed by the company, and the same goes for project managers, but I'm seeing the trend. My next career move will hopefully be to a technical-ish management position outside of IT.
It's really hard to move out of IT, because there is such a stigma that IT are "computer guys" and can't do anything else. But about five years ago I took a job supporting marketing applications and web sites. I got to take the training that marketing professionals got, I got to work closely with people in marketing and public relations. And now I'm fairly well situated to get a job managing web projects for a marketing department.
So, the moral of the story is that if you're interested in IT but worried about getting outsourced at some point, consider taking a role supporting a specific business area that you're interested in. Bonus points if you can get good at business analysis (requirements analysis, process engineering, etc. - these are real skills that take both training and experience to master, and are less likely to be offshored because they require proximity to the business). Then if you want or need to leave IT at some point, hopefully you'll have a few years of experience with that business area under your belt, which will make it easier to transition out.
I did IT project management and infrastructure support for ten years. What I saw was that people who truly preferred technical work to "management" type stuff, if they were good at it, would move into senior technologist roles. This could be senior developer, engineer, architect, etc. The type of work that your average 20-year-old code monkey can't do, because it requires a deep knowledge of many technologies. In those cases, expensive developers with lots of experience are generally preferable as long as they are willing/able to keep up with quickly changing technologies.
Some companies offer manager or even director-level positions that are primarily technical. Others top out the technical track at a "lead" type of position. The company I was at used to have senior directors who were purely technical and did no management whatsoever, but they all got laid off in the last few years.
The original poster, or the GP, could look into consulting firms as well. Often they prefer younger candidates who are able to travel all over the place, but the high-end firms that purport to offer in-depth technical advice for complex problems would probably love someone who's "seen it all".
And the reason I replied here in the first place is to second your "you can always learn a new language". I haven't programmed (besides html/css/js) in about twelve years, and a couple nights ago I was able to pick up enough in a couple hours to modify some jsps. Oh and a few months ago I wrote an app in php despite having never seen a single line of php code before that. Languages are easy, it's the principles that are hard.
So... would that make men vacuous and tepid?
:)
I was one of the CS women that CMU lost (to another major). There were two key reasons - one was that, unlike high school, the assignments in college seemed completely useless and arbitrary to me. Solve the n-queens problem? It was boring and unengaging for me. The other problem was that it was very solitary. Sure you spent all your time in clusters with other students, but the work was mostly solo, and the workload made it difficult to socialize outside schoolwork. Spending all my time in a smelly, dank cluster didn't help either.
It really had less to do with discrimination (at least, not active discrimination) and more to do with the fact that CMU's CS program was just not structured in a way that interested me.
Slightly OT at this point, but my physics teacher in high school used a bell curve for our midterm exam. He took the highest score and made it 100, made the lowest score something just in the failing range, and distributed the rest such that most of the class got C's.
:) with an actual score of 87.
I got the 100
Women might enjoy chopping up a rake or two, but men's eyes grow wide and they get a funny grin whenever you start tossing in glow sticks, marbles, iPhones, and other fun things.
Really? I'm a woman and I thought the glow sticks were about the best one. The marbles were cool too. All the electronics gadgets just get reduced to black powder - boring after the first one.
I was excited to see if the pens resulted in a pool of inky goo, but most of that seemed to stick to the sides. Disappointing.
There was one where they were about to try a crowbar, then took it out and replaced it with something else. I didn't watch them with sound so I don't know why they did that, but it seemed pretty obvious the crowbar wasn't going to blend. Everything else went in about 30 seconds though!
Toyota's even better with dealership complaints. After a few years of everything from overly long service appointments, rude service, sexism (the only time I've ever experienced it was getting my car fixed - what a stereotype), and possibly fraudulent behavior, I wrote a letter to Toyota Corporate explaining some of the situations. The official stance is that dealerships are independent, but Toyota gave this dealership a special service award, so I thought they might want to know what really goes on there.
The response? A letter back thanking me for my inquiry into special deals and/or recalls, and informing me that there are no recalls applicable to my vehicle. I'm still confused about that one.
I found a much better dealership for service, and I love my Toyota, but I will not buy another one.
I was a CS major at CMU for my freshman year (1996). They interviewed me as a female CS student as part of research into why more women didn't do CS or stay with it (no idea if it was part of the research for the book though). I said I loved CS and didn't know why more women didn't do it.
A year later, I was gone from the major. The main reason was that CMU's program is extremely intense and technical, which is fantastic, but you have to LOVE it to be successful at it. I just didn't love it enough to put in the kind of time it required. That, and I didn't like spending so much time sitting in clusters coding.
At the time part of their theory was that men like to get into the nuts and bolts of computers, studying them for what they are, whereas women like to study computers to figure out how they can be better applied to "real life". I don't know how true that is in general, but I'd definitely say that's a fair assessment for me.
The enemy gate is down.
After reading some of the posts below (and TFA), the criteria were very generic and didn't really capture true "wired-ness".
They also didn't get accurate info. for example, CMU absolutely allows personal web pages, nearly every student, professor, and class has one. You can run your own server, or use the school's network. There is a campus-wide file system. When I was there, every incoming freshman (humanities and all) was required to take a computer literacy course that included Unix and emacs. And students don't have access to Usenet? Things must have changed an awful lot in the past 4 years.
And things like requiring students to own a computer - CMU was the kind of place where you didn't have to require it, everyone did it anyway.
The more you look at it, the more it seems this study is just a way to get readers over to Forbes.com. Things like how connected a campus is really can't be determined with any accuracy by a handful of vague characteristics. Hopefully people will do their own research before making any decisions, since I'm sure there are many other great "connected" schools that didn't even make this list.
And what about CMU? A few years back they were considered way up there, if not #1. T1 to all the dorms by my freshman year (1996), wireless at big chunks of campus in 99, hell we had a robot that roamed the halls freely and took commands issued via a web site.
Perhaps in the past few years there has been less of a focus on technology than there used to be.
My high school's social structure didn't seem to discriminate rich vs. poor, popular vs. unpopular, etc. Instead, it almost seemed more a matter of smart vs. not-so-smart. This was the idea perpetuated by the administration. Coming from one of the top high schools in the country (Blue Ribbon if that means anything to you), the school was obsessed with academic excellence. We offered tons of AP programs, and if you were good enough to get in, it was a great school. But if you weren't, well, don't expect any special treatment from administration.
But, I had all the experiences described here. I had them much earlier, from around 5th to 7th grade. I was asked about my sex life in terms I didn't yet understand, I was called a bitch by people who didn't even know me. People would steal my friend's purse and put it in my locker so everyone, including the teacher, thought I stole it. I was seldom physically abused but that too happened to me.
The teachers and administration didn't support this behavior directly. They didn't dislike me for not "fitting in". In fact, I think they liked me because I was a good student (at least until the social pressure got to me). But they never did anything about it. They saw what the other kids did to me and never said anything. No one stepped in until my parents called the police, claiming I was being harassed. Even then, not nearly enough was done, and it only got worse for me.
But here's the thing. All this didn't happen to me just because I was smart. It didn't happen because I wore weird clothes. It happened, I believe, for two reasons: one, I was more mature than most kids at my age, and two, I didn't have the right material things. My town is wealthy, and so were my parents, but in an attempt not to spoil me, they didn't buy me a new wardrobe every month. I didn't have the latest stereo or Nintendo system, I didn't watch the right TV shows all the time, etc.
I just didn't fit in. It wasn't because I was smart; a lot of popular and bitchy kids went on to great colleges and art schools, and spent just as much time in AP classes as I did. It was because I just couldn't understand how to fit in. I was shy, and that was perceived as being antisocial. I was mature, and couldn't figure out why things like idle gossip were so intriguing.
I think the horrors described here are very real. I don't think it's because we're smart or choose to be different (some of the most popular kids in my school were very strange). I think it's because we just weren't able to fit in and be accepted, possibly because we had our minds on other things, more important than popularity. And that is maturity in my book, not intelligence. (Money is also a factor- it's hard to be popular in middle school and high school years if you can't dress the part.)
Black trenchcoats do not kill people. TV does not kill people. Video games, even Quake, do not kill people. The Internet does not kill people. People kill people.
The shooters were obviously not entirely sane; I'd venture that they were psychotic and probably paranoid. But psychology theory indicates that while people are usually predisposed to some psychological condition, that condition is triggered by some stressor. Enough has been said here about the horrors of high school life (for me, it was Middle School) that I don't have to elaborate. Those nightmares would push anyone to the edge. The shooters, tragically, got pushed over the edge.
So where does the blame fall? Well, were these kids several years younger I'd have to blame the parents. But, the actions of someone in high school have to be attributed to that person and no one else.
So what made them do it? I'm guessing it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet or gaming, which actually help relieve stress in most of us who partake in such activities. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that it probably wasn't the black outerwear either.
Most likely, they were already mentally disturbed, and instead of getting treatment they had to endure the trials of social life in high school. I'm in college now, and very thankful I didn't kill myself or end up in jail, because things are better. But while I was in middle school, I didn't think things would ever change. There was no end in sight for the torture I got every single day.
Bottom line- mix troubled people with a cruel, unforgiving, and nonunderstanding societal structure, make them think it will go on forever, and you get two psychotic suicidal killers. Sadly, I'm not at all surprised this happened.
My deepest sympathies go out to the friends and families of the deceased and injured.