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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)

#61

Post by bigethan »

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…

> And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

That sounds pretty awesome, actually. Who wouldn't want to add that wealth of experience to their web repo?

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

#62

Post by mikekchar »

ajmurmann wrote: post #54
bburshteyn wrote: post #40

Many great businesses were started by founders aged 50+. "The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five." Cites: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-entrepreneurs-... ; http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...

I'm always do relieved to be reminded of this. I'm in my early thirties and an getting nervous about the window of opportunity passing.

I worked in 2 successful startups (successful in that it made millions for the founders) where the founders started up the business after they retired from their normal job. My experience has been that VC firms like experience. "I've got a great idea. I have contacts in the area who are lining up to join me. I have 30 years of experience running these kinds of projects. All I need is cash." is a pretty good pitch.

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

#63

Post by Frondo »

ajmurmann wrote: post #54
bburshteyn wrote: post #40

Many great businesses were started by founders aged 50+. "The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five." Cites: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-entrepreneurs-... ; http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...

I'm always do relieved to be reminded of this. I'm in my early thirties and an getting nervous about the window of opportunity passing.

Don't worry about that. The thing you'd want to worry about, if anything, is spending years just grinding away in your one little niche.

Lots of old people start companies, but the key to success is having a wide variety of experience, and not being afraid to get more (like sales! like marketing! and so on!).

You can do it! (I did! And just landed my 4th customer for a high-dollar-value subscription service!)

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

#64

Post by fit2rule »

45 years old, been a professional developer since I was 13 (sold my first code in '83), been through all the ropes in 3 decades .. and am now facing the agism of this industry with a fury.

My advice to all of you - young or old - is never forget to learn new things. Always have at least 5% of your stack of things, to do with learning something new. Software development is not a 'career': its an art form. There will always be new states of the art, and as an evolving process, will necessarily involve abandoning the old and continuing with the new.

Nobody cares if you're old. Everybody cares if you've been doing it for 30 years and still can't write a parser, or compile a new library, or spend 8 hours to hack up some code in a new language that nobody knows about yet. Keep that stuff up, newbies and old-folks alike .. its the only way forward.

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

#65

Post by tatx »

In today’s tech environment, you have to be a fickle programmer to get yourself hired. With age however most people learn just the opposite - to be less fickle and more focused.

I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products, hoping they will stick. These guys built a CAD product on the cloud called Onshape, check out their engineering team - https://www.onshape.com/team

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

#66

Post by cjg »

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…

You said: "And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?"

That smacks of pure ageism to me. Just recast it to a racial context to see:

"And who wants to hire a black junior web developer?"

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

#67

Post by angelbob »

tatx wrote: post #65

In today’s tech environment, you have to be a fickle programmer to get yourself hired. With age however most people learn just the opposite - to be less fickle and more focused. I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products, hoping they wi…

The passing phase in question has been going on for 10+ years. Up to 20, depending how you count.

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

#68

Post by angelbob »

navbaker wrote: post #38

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

A reminder that one way to keep your job security is to learn an important legacy tech really well.

I have high hopes for Ruby on Rails -- it won't have the longevity of COBOL, but it's gonna be a nightmare of a legacy system ;-)

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

#69

Post by bonobo3000 »

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…

>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.

As a young dev, I really want to learn how to do this. I'm a newcomer to the Scala party, but I can definitely see it becoming a huge player and there are so many reasons - Odersky has basically a team of PhDs at EPFL constantly making awesome stuff for the language and they have made some incredible stuff - TASTY + scala-meta is one of the latest, Scala.JS is another, and really the list goes on and on.

But I'm only beginning to clue in on this now. Would've been great if I had jumped in earlier. If you don't mind me asking, how do you learn to pick the right horse? What were the signals for Scala? my guess now is the fact that Odersky was a major contributor to Java and built both a strong technical team and corporate backing, but thats hindsight ofcourse :)

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

#70

Post by jrumbut »

nlawalker wrote: post #37
maratd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where do the opportunities come from? How do you market yourself?

Joining the various social networks, LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, HackerNews, etc is the place to start. Having your own website might be a decent idea too. If you post even the smallest of code samples you'be shown an employer two things that will not be true of all, or even most, candidates: that you can write working code in at least one language and that you use some of your spare time for skill development.

Beyond that, language/technology specific Meetups, mailing lists, github repos, and even IRC are a great way to be noticed.

The last thing is that, especially for a new or niche specific technology, it really helps to be in one of the tech hub cities. Remote work is often available however it requires more self promotion (IMO) than being on site.

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