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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)

#41

Post by danieltillett »

markbnj wrote: post #34
danieltillett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the key is keep learning - unless you keep up you will end up on the scrap heap very quickly. I am not quite as old (45) and I still love learning new things, but it does take more effort than when I was younger.

>> but it does take more effort than when I was younger. Absolutely true, and it's also fair to say that I have to work harder now to remember things that I could recall effortlessly twenty years ago. Fortunately the development of the Internet into a global knowledge store perfectly coincided with my getting older :). I know most developers couldn't work without the Internet these days, and that's doubly true for me…

Yep the internet makes it possible to learn on your own - I am a totally self-taught developer. I tried to teach myself back in the 80s as a teenager and it was near impossible.

I still remember trying to write assembler back then by memory poking to speed up the inner loops of my BASIC programs. The crazy thing is occasionally I would get it to work despite having (almost) no idea what I was doing.

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

#42

Post by sanmon3186 »

navbaker wrote: post #38

My uncle is a 65 year old COBOL programmer who has never been out of work.

Legacy code buried in enterprises will always need supporting skills. With aging workforce that coded for mainframes, COBOL will pay more in near future IMO.

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

#43

Post by WalterSear »

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…

I'm 44. I got my first 'real developer' job at 40 :)

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

#44

Post by WalterSear »

markbnj wrote: post #34
danieltillett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the key is keep learning - unless you keep up you will end up on the scrap heap very quickly. I am not quite as old (45) and I still love learning new things, but it does take more effort than when I was younger.

>> but it does take more effort than when I was younger. Absolutely true, and it's also fair to say that I have to work harder now to remember things that I could recall effortlessly twenty years ago. Fortunately the development of the Internet into a global knowledge store perfectly coincided with my getting older :). I know most developers couldn't work without the Internet these days, and that's doubly true for me…

I often wonder how much of the forgetfulness is the environment, myself.

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

#45

Post by danieltillett »

Animats wrote: post #29
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…

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.

You can solve this to some extent by learning a few different specialties, the real problem is all the tacit knowledge you need. There are a lot of areas I know all the theory, but I would not be able to get an experiment working as I just don’t have the experience at the bench in those areas.

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

#46

Post by danieltillett »

sanmon3186 wrote: post #42
navbaker wrote: post #38

My uncle is a 65 year old COBOL programmer who has never been out of work.

Legacy code buried in enterprises will always need supporting skills. With aging workforce that coded for mainframes, COBOL will pay more in near future IMO.

Isn’t the problem with COBOL not that learning COBOL is hard, but that you need so much domain knowledge about how the legacy code work?

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

#47

Post by MCRed »

Due to a startup failing I had occasion to do two job searches in the course of a year. For one, I had %100 correlation-- when the call was a video call (Even to HR reps who know nothing about technology) I wouldn't get called back. Now I'm not ugly, I'm handsome, but my beard is white. On the other hand, when the contact would be via phone call only, I would get offers.

This is with bay area startups. Outside the bay area I can't say... but because I'm not in the bay area and all interaction with them was remote I can say there was a comparison to be made.

It's the dipthong startups that are the problem-- these kids these days don't know nothing about technology and believed Mark Zuckerberg on the Startup School stage in 2007 when he said "Don't hire anyone over 30 years old! Young people just get it." (paraphrasing, but I was there, it was obvious he had no understanding of the concept of wisdom.)

Anyway, discrimination means you miss out on the best people-- and at least according to my employers, they're pretty grateful to have me.

But pebble, digital ocean, and the like... they can't see past the grey beard.

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

#48

Post by MCRed »

kspaans wrote: post #36
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…

Have you found that your salary followed a trend of increasing ~10%/year? (I read that somewhere as the target amount you should receive as a raise annually.) Give-or-take fluctuations due to lay-offs, taking opportunities over salary, etc.

No. At some point about 5 years of experience, your salary plateaus.... that is if you're getting a job as a person who writes code.

Managers don't seem to make more either, so it seems you have to be specialized and have a really impeccable resume (and that doesn't mean having Microsoft and Apple and Facebook on it.)

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

#49

Post by Animats »

MCRed wrote: post #47

Due to a startup failing I had occasion to do two job searches in the course of a year. For one, I had %100 correlation-- when the call was a video call (Even to HR reps who know nothing about technology) I wouldn't get called back. Now I'm not ugly, I'm handsome, but my beard is white. On the other hand, when the contact would be via phone call only, I would get offers. This is with bay area startups. Outside the ba…

Shave.

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

#50

Post by philsnow »

kspaans wrote: post #36
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…

Have you found that your salary followed a trend of increasing ~10%/year? (I read that somewhere as the target amount you should receive as a raise annually.) Give-or-take fluctuations due to lay-offs, taking opportunities over salary, etc.

1.1 ^ 40 is a factor of ~45. If your first job is around $40k, and if you get 10% raise every year, your salary after 40 years will be $1.8MM / year.
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