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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied to Atlassian many years ago and what struck me is their refusal to entertain non java devs to cross over. If they want more seniors they should consider c# or other language devs who could cross over.

That is actually a really hazardous approach, almost every job I've had as a software developer have introduced me to a new language and as someone who's been writing code for 10+ years there's hardly a large struggle to learn a new language or framework, especially if it's just another c-like imperative language .

I heard this so many times before about just another language... learning language itself? yes, can be done damn fast, plus everybody had some java-like language in their studies. Knowing this means almost nothing, we're talking about very junior-level resource.

You know gazillions of frameworks to achieve everything these days, their integration tricks, various app servers, CI toolsets and so on and on?

I mean, if you are senior in something, are you senior also in XXX language, meaning I give you spec, we talk and you deliver proper maintenable solution, leading dev team, managing all issues and bumps along the road? If no, and you just come as described junior, nobody has time to babysit you for weeks/months, and you are not willing to take junior salary. but that's what you are to the company.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#272
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much "get out of tech" as it is "stay in tech, but not at a company that specializes in tech". Non-tech companies need specialized software, too. When I was in college, I knew multiple people who had internships working on internal tools for a major bank. I imagine those banks also employ senior people to work on their internal tools, customer-facing web portals, etc. And it's not just banks. I once interviewe…

Not so much "get out of tech" as it is "stay in tech, but not at a company that specializes in tech". That's not exactly a solution tho' is it? Why go to a company where you are a cost centre, just because you reach a certain age?

They tend to be more mature environments, free of the "brogrammer" culture that's hostile to older people, women, LGBT people, etc. There's not attitude of "let's have a cool, hip office full of cool, hip young people". It's an environment where "culture fit" isn't used as an excuse to discriminate against older people.

It actually turns out that more corporate environments are actually friendlier to marginalized groups than a quirky freewheeling startup.

Job security is great. Big, established juggernauts don't have the kind of churn startups have... there's no worry about "what if the VCs don't go for another round of funding?", and the markets are well-established and slow to change. And if you go into defense contracting or public sector, you might even have lifetime employment.

The work environment is probably going to be nicer. Traditional corporations don't do open offices and don't require engineers to work 60+ hour weeks. Some of us would prefer do to 9-5 in our own cubicle. Banks are also especially generous with PTO (and remember that the "unlimited" PTO you get at startups is a scam)... I'm just going to quote a friend of mine on Facebook when I decided to post a general question of "how much PTO do you get?":

> I used to work for a bank, and they're notorious for giving tons of time, but when in my first position, I had 2 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days. When I was rehired further up the food chain, I got 4 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days, and I could buy an extra week off by lopping a week of pay off my annual salary. If I'd stayed longer, climbed more, I could max out at 8 weeks paid vacation with all the rest of it.

Not all of us care about doing interesting or ground-breaking work. We just want to stay employed so we can fund our lives, and we want a work environment that doesn't make us hate ourselves and want to die.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy at my employer -- we're a tech company, but the environment is very corporate (we're a telecom), and it doesn't feel like a startup at all. The work environment is highly praised, we're ranked as one of the top work environments on Glassdoor, and half of my team are graybeards. I don't want to leave here, but if it ends up happening anyway, I'm giving serious thoughts to pursuing public sector work after this.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#273

Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least. You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic. Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time. For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and…

> Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again

Unless she finds out.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#274

I'll probably be ~36 by the time I complete a PhD in CS. Should I be OK in terms of finding jobs at hip companies upon graduation (big 4, etc)? My areas of interest is in ML, algorithms but I'm completely OK with normal software development positions. Reason I'm older is I decided I had a passion for it in my late 20s / wanted to do research, but had to go back to school to take classes before enrolling into a PhD. H…

In my experience, age is measured from when you finished your education and not from when you were born.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#275

Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age. That said, the OP is correct. You're only as good as your last two years and even that's pushing it. If the tech changes, you have to adapt with it. I'm 53 as of yesterday (the 8th). I started with PDP-11's in the 80's, then VAX's, then PC's, BASIC at first, then C, the…

I'm not convinced that there's more jobs than people in the tech market, especially now that people are starting to wise up to the fact that jobs are being automated away and want to transition into stabler markets like ours.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#276
post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

> technical interview process

Even before that is the technical screening process. If the company has standardized on Angular 2, your experience with Dojo, Ext-JS, jQuery and even Angular 1 is considered irrelevant by the screeners - you may as well have experience in medieval basket weaving; they won't even call you. If the company has standardized on Groovy, your experience with Java is equally irrelevant. If the company has standardized on MySQL, your experience with Oracle is irrelevant. If the company has standardized on Linux, your experience with Solaris is irrelevant. And on and on it goes...

There's a perception (which I've already seen repeated 10 times in this thread, and I'm only halfway through it) that the "new thing" always completely replaces and invalidates the old thing. But that's almost never the case. Angular uses jQuery. jQuery uses Javascript. Javascript uses the DOM. Groovy uses Java. Hibernate uses JDBC. AJAX uses HTTP. HTTP uses TCP/IP. They all use the OS. And when X uses Y, Y can go wrong in ways you didn't expect if you just assumed that Y became meaningless when X came along.

So we have this environment where the hiring managers are shooting themselves in the foot by looking for style over substance and anybody who tries to bring it up is dismissed as a dinosaur with a case of sour grapes.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#277
post #176

Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least. You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic. Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time. For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and…

> use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time I usually use statistics. If you select a random point on the lifetime of something. There is a 50% chance, that you are closer to the middle then either start or end. Thus: Always assume you are roughly in the middle of the lifetime. In other words, if some technology is only one year old, assume it is dead in another year…

So that means C looks pretty safe... 44 years. C++ is 33 years.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#278
post #104

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest…

> Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that? I'm not old, I've just past "il mezzo del cammin della mia vita" (meaning I'm 36), and I have to say that the latest and shiniest JavaScript frameworks are pure and utter shit, and I say that as a guy who finds languages like PHP decent enough. I've started working on a project where…

Heh. I'm right there with you. I've not done web development in over a decade. Yesterday, I decided to look into React. To generate a hello world took over a minute of pulling down and building dependencies. Things are bizzare and inane now. All I want is a .js file to link in my HTML and for that .js to be editable.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#279
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time I usually use statistics. If you select a random point on the lifetime of something. There is a 50% chance, that you are closer to the middle then either start or end. Thus: Always assume you are roughly in the middle of the lifetime. In other words, if some technology is only one year old, assume it is dead in another year…

That's a great rule of thumb. You should give it a catchy name so people remember it. When I don't have good insight into whether it's worth my time to learn some new tech, I'm going to try to apply this rule.

It reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#280
post #104

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest…

I'm 47 and don't believe its a "macro-domain" issue. Maybe in some micro domains like getting hired at Facebook and Google that is the case. Software is eating the world and in my experience, there is still way more jobs than competent people. I have an older friend who's does c#/.Net/webapps consulting. He's has an endless stream of opportunities and never works for less than 70 an hour which is great wage for the southeast region where he lives.
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