Hi there I am 45 years old. Been out of work since 2002.
In my prime I earned $150K/year as a programmer analyst writing business software for mostly Microsoft Windows platforms. That was before the Dotcom bubble burst and the market got flooded with younger cheaper labor developers who only studied in hacker school for three months how to become a developer with no college degree and high school dropouts. They work for like $20K/year and write sloppy code with security flaws and poor quality.
I've been programming since I was 12 in 1980 learning BASIC on 8 bit microcomputers, and learning COBOL and FORTRAN on mainframes using punch cards. At first I made mistakes and failed like any other person learning how to be a programmer. I learned from my mistakes and kept getting better. Over my life I learned over 37 different programming languages on countless different platforms. But none of that matters anymore.
Many people I worked with at my age, most of them did suicide because of the stress of working or not being able to find a steady job. Those who stayed in the computer industry became software consultants and got ripped off by broker agencies and in most cases not paid for their work or even being given credit for it, some ended up homeless, others ended up disabled from the stress like me.
This industry can eat you up and spit you out.
I was able to earn money as a 'super debugger', a phrase made by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper when I heard once of her speeches on programming and debugging and how using less code is faster and better, etc. She used to carry some copper wire on her wrist as a bracelet, when they decommissioned some mainframe core memory it was wire wrapped. She would show it to young people like me to teach me that wasting code is wasting memory and resources, and that if you can do the same thing with less code, it runs faster, uses less resources, and less memory.
But nobody seems to want to take her seriously anymore, even if she is a pioneer into computer science, and had invented a lot of the tech we still use today. In her time they claimed it was not possible to have a programming language, they also claimed women could not do computer work, and she proved them wrong on both counts.
Anyway some of my friends who survived, ended up working in fast food and retail and clerk jobs, because nobody wants to hire a person over 30 these days for programming work, and even if they do it is software contracting and they get ripped off.
One of my friends Michael David Crawford who was a Senior Engineer at Apple and Drobo and other places wrote this in his email response:
Dear Friends,
I was until quite recently out of work for three solid years despite
my having for well over fifteen solid years received ~35 software
engineering employment or consulting inquiries from recruiters - also
known as "headhunters" as well as "brokers" - ...
... While at the same time I found it Damn near impossible even to
_find_ the kinds of software publishers I hoped to work for, let alone
any actual open job opportunites, due the quite common lack of street
or postal addresses on corporate websites.
I rsolved to take matters into my own hands by once and for all
putting a permanent end not only to my own chronic unemployment but
that of a half-million of my colleagues in the engineering
professions.
I recently read at Soylentnews (http://soylentnews.org/) that there is
expected to be by 2020 a shortage of one million software engineers in
the United States alone.
I remain dumbfounded, given that there is presently a _surplus_ of
500,000 software engineers as well as that chronic unemployment - the
kind that creates large, unexplainable gaps in one's resume, therefore
rendering one largely unemployable - is quite steadily growing worse
over time.
It Does Not Have To Be This Way.
Behold:
Local Jobs, Local Candidates:
The Global Computer Employer Index
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/
Note that my _entire_ site consists of naught but static hand-coded
Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict as well as Valid CSS2. There has never been
any software of _any_ sort behind any of the many commercial websites
I've operated since 1994, nor - quite likely - will there _ever_ be.
My Global Computer Employer Index is built _entirely_ by hand, through
careful, diligent and patient online research, as well as offline
literature research in public and University libraries.
I learned all about how to do that when I majored at first in Optical
Astronomy then later Physics at Caltech - the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, as well as at the University of California
Santa Cruz, where I obtained my B.A. in Physics in 1993.
You could really help a vast quantity of hungry, hurting people out
were you to lay this mail into the hands of _anyone_ you genuinely
feel would benefit from or would be interested in it.
I Am Eternally In Your Debt,
Michael David Crawford P.E., Process Architect
Solving the Software Problem
http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...
mdcrawford@gmail.com