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Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

nytimes.com

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Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#21

Post by steven2012 »

I'm in my 40s and recently changed jobs. Every single company that I sent my resume to contacted me and I got through the phone screens on all but 1. That company sent a frontend developer just out of college to interview me, but I'm pure backend and didn't know too many frontend concepts, which flummoxed the interviewer. He basically had no idea how to interview me and gave up.

Of the companies I went onsite to, half of them gave me offers. The others didn't, but not because of ageism but because my interview performance wasn't as strong as I hoped (asking questions in areas I wasn't prepared for, lack of expertise in their desired programming lang, screwed up the coding question, etc). All of the offers I received were an increase from my current job.

Overall I would say that ageism doesn't exist. Employers want people that can contribute quickly without a lot of handholding and without training. This applies whether or not you are a fresh grad or a veteran programmer. If you instill confidence that you are highly qualified to the interviewer, you will generally get the job.

And as someone who has been intimately involved in the hiring process as a hiring manager, I can say the same thing. I've interviewed people of a variety of ages and the only takeaway I care about is will they hit the ground running and contribute to the team quickly. That's why software developers are highly paid. When I first started working, IBM would give aptitude tests completely unrelated to programming, and if you did well, you would get a job and be trained.

Unfortunately those days don't exist anymore, for the most part. It's a problem caused strictly because of how highly paid engineers are. If salaries were 50-60k, then I'm pretty sure companies would be more apt to training and waiting for new people to get on board. But salaries are easily 3X that in the Valley, so at that price, you need to be contributing very quickly otherwise you're a waste of money.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#22

Post by graycat »

The article has

"stay on the cutting edge".

Ha! The real leading edge is work that is at least "new, correct, and significant" and published in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in information technology, yes, and also powerful and valuable in practice.

So, put on resume that have published in original mathematical statistics for detecting zero-day problems, in artificial intelligence, and in optimization, and still get silence. With Silicon Valley, leading edge has no connection with peer-reviewed original research!

So, do a startup. Web development? Taught myself -- the Web page code works fine. The difficulty was a lot of poorly written documentaiton. The software was fast, fun, and easy.

"Leading edge"? Yup -- my startup is based on some original applied math I derived, complete with theorems and proofs. Likely and apparently I'm the only person in the world who understands that work. Definitely leading.

The problem my work solves, a lot of people have regarded as important. So far, I have the only good solution. Some of the people trying to solve the problem say that the solution I have is impossible -- they didn't understand what the heck they were talking about. They couldn't come up with a counterexample why not or a theorem of why can. The people just were not very good.

Problem is, really, leading is not what Silicon Valley is looking for. They wouldn't know the real stuff about leading if it slapped them in the face. My best published papers, nearly no one in Silicon Valley has the prerequisites to read, and likely no one outside of Stanford or Berkeley and only a few people there.

Instead of leading, they want two years of experience in just what the heck low grade, routine, simple minded, poorly documented API or OSS they are struggling with today.

Those people are being self-taught on their way to the leading edge and are floundering around and stand not to get to the leading edge. E.g., they keep saying Bayesian and power law but don't know the difference between the weak and strong laws of large numbers or about conditional expectation, non-parametric hypothesis tests, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, anything about martingales, the Neyman-Pearson lemma, etc., enough about conditioning even to understand the definition of a Markov process, a basic result such as

E[E[Y|X]] = E[Y]

the role of sigma algebras, or any such things.

Early in my career, I started in computing and started to get self-taught in the often associated applied math. I made good progress in some things but otherwise floundered around with low quality materials, etc.

Then I went for a good Ph.D. and got one. Now I can say, nearly no one in Silicon Valley startups is in any significant sense even near the leading edge and, instead, they are just floundering around.

Back to my startup -- a few good days and I should be able to go live.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#23

Post by lqdc13 »

danieltillett wrote: post #20
jordanb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope. If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in unt…

As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled. Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

Biotech also pays a lot less.

If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.

Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#24

Post by hibikir »

Isamu wrote: post #14
markbnj wrote: post #7

So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Learning the next thing is a wearisome burden for…

Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly. On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 year…

Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines.

My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#25

Post by danieltillett »

lqdc13 wrote: post #23
danieltillett wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled. Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

Biotech also pays a lot less. If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+. Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.

This is certainly true. The reason why is most of the "bioinformatics programmers” come from a biology background and switch over to development. It is far quicker to go from biology -> cs than cs -> biology.

The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#26

Post by eCubeH »

Some of these guys may be super specialized, and not find easy opportunities in their line. Others may just not be agile enough to stay on top of the latest thing that came up in the last 6 months, which is perhaps more of a DevOps mentality.

But on the hardware aspect, I would think there is hope. Given the increasing move towards the new maker mode of desktop fabrication & IoT, there should be demand for people with hardware skill sets that integrate well with web, cloud & mobile.

The problem always remains that the smartest minds are frequently poor at marketing themselves.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#27

Post by maratd »

hibikir wrote: post #24
Isamu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly. On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 year…

Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines. My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are act…

Yup, there's a delay. After a while, you develop a knack for picking the right horse. So you pick the right horse, learn it on your spare time ... and then wait. Eventually that new kid on the block will become mature, stable, and a good solution for projects. That's when opportunities start. Rinse and repeat.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#28

Post by [deleted] »

danieltillett wrote: post #20
jordanb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope. If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in unt…

As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled. Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

[deleted]

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#29

Post by Animats »

jordanb wrote: post #13
markbnj wrote: post #7

So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Learning the next thing is a wearisome burden for…

As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope. If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in unt…

Biotech is even worse, because the sub-specialties take so long to learn that picking the wrong one is a career killer. Ask any bio postdoc.

Re: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

#30

Post by aresant »

In legal / medicine / accounting / other fields there are annual license requirements for continued education.

Obviously these fields move slower than tech but would be fascinating to see what could be put together to broadly engage and keep technical people (self included) on their toes.

Mix the curriculum between the applied (new languages / dbs / OS), emerging market exposure (vr / crypto currency / self driving), and the novel (snapchat / vine / etc).

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