71–80 of 231 posts
1) College degrees are not vocational degrees and are not job guarantees. 2) When you talk about not being hired because you're not on top of "fad languages", what I hear is you're not being hired because you're not staying up to date in your field. I'm sure there are blogs by petroleum engineers who say they're being discriminated against because they're not up on this "fracking fad".
I think some of the reason for this is that younger people are more likely to start their programming careers with the current "cool" tools/languages whereas the older programmers will have large amounts of experience and therefor be most valuable (and able to command better salaries) maintaining software that is becoming legacy. Take myself for example, I started doing programming seriously around 2001 when PHP/MySQ…
2 years ago woke up and started exploring, Groovy, Ruby, and then, bing, penny dropped, Scala.
New life at 40 ;-)
In the end you need passion. I would be shocked if I am not coding full-time at 60, nothing grabs me more...
"This page is not available for mobile viewing at this time." Are you kidding me?
So not every English major is going to have a similar backstory. But I do know this: research, organization, and strong writing skills got me where I am. It helps also that I was an engineering school dropout and I share many of the proclivities of my engineering brethren. I just decided at some point in college that I liked writing as a way of making things, and switched to English.
As other commenters have noted, no forty year old is an English major anymore. The point worth making is that receiving a good education and being ambitious, hard-working, curious, and embracing new technology is a good recipe for success. And if you think you're going to get anywhere in this new world without strong written communication skills, you're fooling yourself.
He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer? Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses. I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on tech…
I think his title was more of a gimmick to catch people's eyes; I think it worked.
"I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on technology is laughable"
I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new. (Maybe it has something to do with aversion to risk and experimentation? For me, the ease in which a programmer can jump from one language to another, is a key test for their longevity in the field.) Of course this also holds for younger programmers; it's just that their skills are fresher and in my limited experience they tend to be more open minded both technically and to things like longer hours.
That said, I've known two programmers in their 50's who could kick any 20 something's ass in any of the latest tech. Sadly in my experience, they are very very rare.
Not that I'm worried either way. I'm a Software Engineer with a degree in International Relations and Chinese Language, which will probably be more valuable than an English degree.