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Earlier quoted context omitted.
non-managing software engineer - you write code.
Is it looked down upon if you don't go up in the ranks as you age?
A 40 year old degree in anything alone isn't good enough to stay employed in any field. Except maybe teaching.
You make it sound like these people haven't been working in the field since they got the degree
What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.
I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are usually people or process re…
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
non-managing software engineer - you write code.
Is it looked down upon if you don't go up in the ranks as you age?
There is a reason "developers" are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in retainment packages to keep them from starting their own shops.
Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer.
The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older.
There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything.
I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
1) Doctors and lawyers are seen as exercising judgment, while engineers are seen as building things.
2) Training opportunities (in the "learn by doing" sense of "training") for doctors and lawyers are much harder to come by than for engineers. If you're looking for a lawyer who has taken half a dozen big commercial litigations through trial, you're probably looking for someone very old because there just aren't very many of those trials that happen. Same thing if you're looking for a doctor with half a dozen experiences treating a patient with aggressive cancer. But how hard is it to find a young software engineer with half a dozen big websites under his belt?
Now, I don't think either perception is completely true, in the sense that I think people underestimate how much judgment software engineers exercise and overestimate how quickly they can build up valuable experience.
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
Doctors and lawyers gain skill as they get older because the problems and solutions don't change quickly, and the fields have such depth that expertise takes decades to acquire. We work in an industry where the state-of-the-art is perpetually accessible to 20-somethings who haven't done anything, because the technology gets blown up once a decade (or so). Even if you stay up to date, why would anyone pay you a salary…
The evergreen underpinnings, the basic knowledge of how to build systems floats through languages and technologies.