91–100 of 258 posts
There is a technology called hair coloring, stack it with a hoodie and some well fitted slacks, roll up one of the ankle cuffs a bit. Talk like you've exited a startup and are just working for fun, or something to keep you interested, but not like you actually have to.
Not me, but my father in law, located in the midwest, is a sql dev. He's about to retire in a few years, switched jobs a few years back. From what he tells me, they didn't care that he was going to retire soon, they needed his skillset. Location probably matters. My (also midwest) company was foaming at the mouth for a competent Java/SAP developer (which, forgive me for being catty, seems like a technology only a 40+…
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I feel this does not address the question directly. I know passionate, good developers over 50, and they do have hard times on the free market (I can still use 'they' as I'm few years younger). It raises the question - when were you last time actively job hunting?
I'm contracting, so the last time I aced a discussion about a job was about 5 hours ago.
I'm 60, and going strong. Most important is bring not only depth and breadth of knowledge but also wisdom to the work. As a graybeard, you're expected to add value because of your years. For example, when my office was going nuts about Kubernetes, devops, etc., it got me a raise to compare this new tech to the original Unix philosophy and point out some lessons learned in Unix design that would help with our containe…
Care to share this wisdom? I'm wrassling with these kontainers now and I'm wondering why people think they're so wonderful.
Side questions if anybody answers this. How did you get your first job industry? I imagine corporation weren’t like there are now and thought of code as black magic.
Late ‘90s, and it was just as hard as today. Applied to dozens of companies as a Senior in undergrad. Similar 1 on 20 response rate as today. I remember the interview—typical “solve this trivial thing in a language of your choice.” Most college kids picked java. I picked x86 assembly and nailed it. In think that impressed someone.
When I code these days, I'll take Python.
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The big money question is: How have you managed to stay passionate about your job? I just posted a comment in another thread about burnout. It's very common in our industry. I believe it's due to the Coolidge Effect. Aka, the brains inherent search for novelty. It's a struggle to not look at almost all programming tasks as just some variation of the same problem, if you've been doing this long enough. How do you keep…
I had a bit of a burnout around 2006 -- I had worked my ass off on a fantastically complex framework, the pinacle of years of experience, and it was a joy. It was SO cool. There was an application on top, which was also pretty cool. And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 month…
The form I am referring to, builds steadily over time. It's not the result of some bad interaction with management, rather, it's the result of doing the "same" thing for 30 years.
I recognize that the problem is in seeing it as the "same" thing. Yet, given our job as programmers is often to see the forest through the trees, to identify patterns, it becomes hard not to see yourself as solving the same set of problems over, and over, and over, and over.
That's the type of burnout I'm referring to. I'm guessing you don't struggle with that at all ;)
I don't really think the tech stack matters. I'm a dotnet guy for the most part and have been gainfully employed from it for 20 years, hell going back to vb-6, com etc before dotnet. I get around age discrimination by looking a lot younger than I am. I achieve this by dressing current which doesn't mean trendy, just don't wear that same old sweater to work you've had for 10 years, keep it for family time. New clothes…
This is my experience as well. I'm a lifelong amateur athlete and I don't wear sloppy clothing. I've seen the difference in treatment with other guys my age (49) firsthand. It's not about looking younger necessarily, just looking like you aren't falling apart. For whatever reason, some people correlate physical appearance with ability.
Everyone here is talking about their skillset, and I'm going to take another direction: appearance and interpersonal skills. There is ageism, yes, but I think a deeper problem is reaction to peoples appearance. If you are late twenties concerned about age, then hide it, starting now. * Always wear sunscreen when you are outside, regardless of race. It prevents skin aging, and you'll still tan and get Vitamin D regard…
I recently changed roles after going back to my UNIX SA roots and working for the last few years in a front-line customer-facing support group; what people would call the ops side of devops. My boss was gutted to lose me as their last line of defense before escalating to Red Hat but what he and his boss miss the most (so they say) is my ability to remain cool under pressure and solve technical issues while managing bridges with MDs and EDs on the line.
Partially it was organizational authority (oh, they escalated to that guy) but it was also technical authority (oh, they escalated to the guy who solved the last major problem we had, and put in a SIP to make it never happen again) and partially it was managing the message and keeping it appropriate to the audience.
I realize this is an absurdly self-aggrandizing post but it's an honest assessment of beyond strictly technical ability how some people add value and my way of agreeing with the post above mine that interpersonal skills are paramount.
And to echo what others have said - keeping current is IMHO the key to keeping employable. I ran down the Red Hat Certified Architect track because my employer paid for it and it was a way to get my guys motivated to get it done too to better their skills. We have several more RHCAs as a result. But I also spent the last year building k8s clusters and figuring out how to integrate kubernetes into my employer's systems and now I'm off extending terraform providers in go to the same end. It's fun as hell to think every day I shave off getting systems to my peers sooner is one more day they're productive that much faster. At the scale we work that's a huge lever. How can anyone not be excited about that regardless of age?
While I don't exactly hide the fact that I'm in my late 40s, I do find myself avoiding some discussions at work that would show my age, like talking about my older experiences or making pop culture references from the '80s or '90s.
Yes, you can talk about making yourself so useful that age doesn't matter, etc., but the truth is that age discrimination is often an unconscious bias, and I just find it easier to "pass" as younger than to spend my energy trying to overcome it.
Of course I focus mostly on just being good at what I do. There are benefits to age. Experience and knowledge, of course, but hopefully also wisdom and temperament.
If there's one thing I'd like people to take away from this thread, particularly people in their 20s, it's to re-examine your unconscious biases about age. How often have you assumed something about a person because they were older than you, and what can you do to overcome that and judge them on their merits instead?