Disclaimer: My programming skills are minimal, but I work with programmers and figure I have some insight into HR requirements for technical staff.
I think it comes down to the area you're working in, but there's some real cultural change going on as tech stuff gets mainstreamed. Old IT measures of productivity (e.g. lines of code) aren't really relevant for today's development processes.
Any internet developer will tell you that service demands and change orders are increasing as sane development timeframes give way to marketing exigencies. The end result in internet-based development is that the average high-level programmer spends increasing amounts of time in meetings and client management with nutcase marketing people who don't have a clue about what is actually required to make something work, they just want it by tomorrow.
I think an important part of being a programmer in that kind of environment is how well you manage that problem, and how happy you can keep the client. The young folks' solution of working 80hrs a week does the job in the interim, but it's not really sustainable. The most successful jobs come from situations where the techies have been able to communicate to clients how long stuff takes, and that this gets built into an overall development timeline. That takes experience, both at a coding level and a communications/service level.
In my experience, a lot of people brought up in the pre-internet I.T. environment simply don't have the communication and customer service skills to survive in a new development culture which is no longer isolated from other business processes; and in which suddenly all sorts of dumb people have an investment in the development timeline. Old-school (not old) IT people are just not responsive: you don't get any feedback on how feasible something is until it's too late, or they don't bother with issues which they don't see as being relevant to what they're interested in (e.g. how a website looks). That's not always true of course, and I think the older programmers with customer service skills are truly in demand, and will be more in demand as companies realise that you can't replace experience with another graduate.
But I think the bottom line for me is that programmers who can pro-actively communicate about what they do to non-technical people are in demand, no matter what their age.
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I think it comes down to the area you're working in, but there's some real cultural change going on as tech stuff gets mainstreamed. Old IT measures of productivity (e.g. lines of code) aren't really relevant for today's development processes.
Any internet developer will tell you that service demands and change orders are increasing as sane development timeframes give way to marketing exigencies. The end result in internet-based development is that the average high-level programmer spends increasing amounts of time in meetings and client management with nutcase marketing people who don't have a clue about what is actually required to make something work, they just want it by tomorrow.
I think an important part of being a programmer in that kind of environment is how well you manage that problem, and how happy you can keep the client. The young folks' solution of working 80hrs a week does the job in the interim, but it's not really sustainable. The most successful jobs come from situations where the techies have been able to communicate to clients how long stuff takes, and that this gets built into an overall development timeline. That takes experience, both at a coding level and a communications/service level.
In my experience, a lot of people brought up in the pre-internet I.T. environment simply don't have the communication and customer service skills to survive in a new development culture which is no longer isolated from other business processes; and in which suddenly all sorts of dumb people have an investment in the development timeline. Old-school (not old) IT people are just not responsive: you don't get any feedback on how feasible something is until it's too late, or they don't bother with issues which they don't see as being relevant to what they're interested in (e.g. how a website looks). That's not always true of course, and I think the older programmers with customer service skills are truly in demand, and will be more in demand as companies realise that you can't replace experience with another graduate.
But I think the bottom line for me is that programmers who can pro-actively communicate about what they do to non-technical people are in demand, no matter what their age.
x.d