Go get a state job. There are plenty of tech jobs in the state. The pay is lower, but so are the expectations. You come in, do your work, go home. You let the vendors deal with all the new fangled bullshit that is just yet another feature LISP had like 40 years ago.
How do you handle your Aging in IT?
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#22"How do you handle your Aging in IT?" Not well. I'm not even that old. I'm tired of the BS and games. I guess I would say suck it up. That's what I'm doing. I can't say it's really working that well.
I think it all depends upon the choices you make. If you chose to climb the management ladder you get exposed to more political games and BS, but on the plus side you tend to get paid more.
I've made an active decision to stay close to the coal face and avoid where possible the political BS. We've got a pretty small dev team, with ages ranging from 21 to 54. We tend to work pretty well together, the younger people having a little more energy for playing with the latest shiny, with the older devs providing a degree of stability but embracing new things where they make sense.
The best thing about having older developers is that they tend to have a lot of intuitional knowledge, allowing the newer and less experienced devs to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#23I'm 35 this year, not exactly old, but slower.
At this stage, I find that my learning skills have outpaced my slower mental agility. It's similar to how people start doing their triathlons in their 40s. I can speed read and have better comprehension. I sleep, cook, and eat better (having money helps vs being a broke 23 year old). I can listen to dense, technical videos on 1.25x speed or less professional videos with stuttering on 2x-3x speed and write down clean notes in real time.
Bill Gates allegedly reads 150 pages/hour in his 60s. So that's my target. Much of it is skills, not attributes, and it's something you have to actively improve.
You have to rekindle the flame constantly. Passion is easier to feed than discipline. "Sucking it up" is a good way to burn out. Think of it sort of like lighting up your marriage - you don't need marriage coaches or toys. You don't need to learn tolerance. You need to see things in the way you once did, and sometimes enjoy the little flaws.
A lot of the best people also have some methodology to learn YetAnotherProduct. Learn to deal with information overflow - find a way to rapidly filter out what's good, what's bad, what has potential. Identify which recommendation sources are good and bad. It's okay to evaluate on gutfeel, but take a scientific approach to it, and note why you feel that way, then revise if you were correct.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#24You might consider contracting. I've been doing that the past few years and loving it. One of the things is that I get to (have to, in fact) choose my projects, so the clients I say yes to are ones whose projects I am interested in at a level beyond just "you'll pay me". They also tend to be in my specialties (UI, graphics, C++, iOS, in my case). I find that I learn a lot more, too, because generally the projects las…
Any advice for how you bootstrapped this and started to get clients? I find that the hardest part about taking the leap and leaving a full-time role.
Agreed.
I think just about anyone would choose to work for themselves if it was easy to get the clients if I'm not mistaken?
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#25Consider a job at a university. It can be hard to get in if you don't know somebody, but that's true anywhere. Many university jobs are given to friends/family even though they are ostensibly/legally posted publicly.
You'll find many more older people there. There is politics, as there is anywhere, and the technology tends to be more boring and proven vs. new and exciting, but sometimes it's cutting-edge if you can find a research-related position. Salary won't be great, but benefits and PTO generally excellent, and it's almost unheard of to get fired or laid off, and work hours will be "normal." You can take some amount of classes for free or cheap, and use all the campus amenities.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#26Find what you are really good at and enjoy doing. Cultivate contacts - really tough for nerds, I know. In my case I was downsized at 55 by a multinational, even though I had won a number of internal awards. They had a habit of cycling managers and my last award winning project didn't cut the ice with my new manager. Interestingly my previous manager and VP were downsized a few months later; so the politics weren't working.
If you don't win the start up lottery, IT can dump you out on the street somewhere between 35 & 55.
Think hard about teaching and government once you hit your mid thirties and haven't won the lottery.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#27The low code/no code tools will get better and there are more and more schools try to teach people coding and convert them into programmers. If you're 35 and above, it is only responsible for you and your family to have a plan B. Don't let others control your fate.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#28"How do you handle your Aging in IT?" Not well. I'm not even that old. I'm tired of the BS and games. I guess I would say suck it up. That's what I'm doing. I can't say it's really working that well.
I think it all depends upon the choices you make. If you chose to climb the management ladder you get exposed to more political games and BS, but on the plus side you tend to get paid more. I've made an active decision to stay close to the coal face and avoid where possible the political BS. We've got a pretty small dev team, with ages ranging from 21 to 54. We tend to work pretty well together, the younger people ha…
I'm a mid level dev. I have to deal with the BS decisions that management makes. They definitely play games with the workers too.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#29Go get a state job. There are plenty of tech jobs in the state. The pay is lower, but so are the expectations. You come in, do your work, go home. You let the vendors deal with all the new fangled bullshit that is just yet another feature LISP had like 40 years ago.
Has a state job. Couldn’t afford to even paint the house. Maybe after the kids are out of school.
Re: How do you handle your Aging in IT?
#30You might consider contracting. I've been doing that the past few years and loving it. One of the things is that I get to (have to, in fact) choose my projects, so the clients I say yes to are ones whose projects I am interested in at a level beyond just "you'll pay me". They also tend to be in my specialties (UI, graphics, C++, iOS, in my case). I find that I learn a lot more, too, because generally the projects las…
Any advice for how you bootstrapped this and started to get clients? I find that the hardest part about taking the leap and leaving a full-time role.
I was temporarily under employed and called up a contracting firm. (Robert Half, experience was fine.)
I had an income 48 hours into the experience. You’re expected to know what you’re worth, but there’s a certain freedom and nearly none of the job hunt bullshit.