71–80 of 137 posts
After reading about 50% of the comments here I feel such relief. Thank for all the commenters!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think if you're not over-specialized that you can still do well. Doing be a person who just writes device drivers, or just does web stuff, or just writes toolchains. Do it all, and at depth when you can. When reviewing job reqs, I see the opposite. Outside the web and mobile arenas, companies seem to want people who are highly specialized in what they do.
That doesn't mean they will get it. We are also looking for pretty specialized people, but there are none. So we will take also those, who are willing to learn. The downside is, that the money that goes to their training would be theirs, if they already knew what is needed (i.e. they cannot ask for the same money/benefits as those who are "ready made").
I'm in my early 40's, but I've recruited software engineers for almost 20 years and I until recently I ran a large Java Users Group over 15 years, which gave me quite a bit of exposure to an older range of engineers. I know many 50+ programmers who are doing quite well (monetarily, respect, responsibility, balance). Some independent consultants, some at startups, some with big firms, etc. A fairly wide variety. Not a…
Why is tenure at one company automatically assumed to be tenure at one job ? I used to work for a major defense contractor. For every engineer there who spent nearly their entire careers in a particular role on a particular program there was another who spent 20+ years moving from program to program, often as a sort of internal consultant. I would honestly put that latter person ahead of both the former and the perso…
You reference a 1:1 ratio between engineers in one role and engineers moving around. Based only on my experience I would estimate that ratio closer to 5:1.
By 53 I determined the future of software engineering is in strongly-typed functional languages. I left my job as technical director for a product line of CoreLogic's and began a professional sabbatical studying, writing articles, and speaking.
Eventually had to go back to some contract work.
At 55 I was hired by the young Stanford and Yale alumni founders of Tachyus as the first engineering hire to develop the strongly-typed functional software platform for the company. Tachyus is doing very well. http://www.breakoutlist.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think if you're not over-specialized that you can still do well. Doing be a person who just writes device drivers, or just does web stuff, or just writes toolchains. Do it all, and at depth when you can. When reviewing job reqs, I see the opposite. Outside the web and mobile arenas, companies seem to want people who are highly specialized in what they do.
Perhaps, but in a few years when the company has a down year will you be replaceable by the next specialist, or are you able to get a few fingers in different pies by being diversified?
I did real-time radar signal processing for six years, and hardware production support on radar electronics for 3.5 years prior to that. I can't convince anyone that these experiences are easily transferrable to other areas such as robotics and medical devices. In fact, I don't even get the chance; hardly anyone will even give me a phone screen. Yet I have been doing NLP for the past three years and can't get recruiters to leave me alone about it.
I'm 40 and feel like my career is almost over. It's a big shock to go on interviews where I'm the oldest person there by 10+ years.
The only advice I can pass on to the "younger" crew is to simply be prepared. You can do so in two ways, both of which are necessary: - Stay relatively current but continually grow your knowledge depth. Imagine a full-stack developer who has little awareness of anything new in the past ten years...don't be that person. Complacency for your career will kill your prospects fast. An advantage that you develop over time…
Do not assume that 50 is the threshold that you cross when you have to start dealing with ageism. It will be different for many (it's often much earlier), and you won't see it coming. One day, you'll be relatively dismissed by someone younger than you due to your "age", and you'll think "what the $#@% just happened?" One of the things that galls me about this industry is its belief that experience (which is not the s…
I see this as something that shifts during economic cycles. For example, right now nobody appreciates much that came from those who survived the dot-com bust. Those skills will be invaluable in the next downturn, whenever that happens.
Regarding "TwiFaceGoogSoft": there is an old maxim -- never hire anyone directly from {big-tech-co}, if that's the only place they've ever worked. (In the 1980s, it was IBM. In the 1990s, it was Microsoft. In the 2000s, it was Google.) The maxim developed because those ex-big-co employees were perceived as failures when encountering a non-advantaged environment. The prevailing wisdom was to hire those people "once-removed" from those companies, so they wouldn't learn those lessons on your dime. It might not be fair, but the perception has remained for a long time, even as the big-co name has changed.
In the end, as an industry we need to simply get better at hiring. All these biases only serve to screw us up.