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Sucks to be an old engineer

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Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#41

Post by arn »

frostmatthew wrote: post #13

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?

Actually don't know if that's true. As a former physician myself, in many circumstances, I would prefer a younger (to a degree) physician to a much older one. Medical knowledge does change relatively quickly and standards of care change a lot.

For the same reason as engineers, it comes down to keeping up with the field. I don't know for a fact that an old physician hasn't kept up with the field, but I do know a younger one can only be so behind.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#42

Post by MetaCosm »

"""When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly."""

Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#43

Post by DavidAdams »

I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground.

That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people.

In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely.

I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#44

Post by andyl »

I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance.

ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other (better) alternatives.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#45

Post by mark_l_watson »

MaggieL wrote: post #4

It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills. I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012. I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.

+1 investing constantly in education and learning new skills is the way to go!

I am 62 and I have been consulting for 15 years so age has not such an issue. Honestly, I can understand why a company might not want to hire an older software engineer but in my experience companies don't mind old consultants.

When asked for advice by people wanting to have a lifestyle (work on your own terms) consulting business, I suggest they, in addition to working, also invest time in writing a lot (blogging, books) and contributing to open source projects.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#46

Post by beachstartup »

gems wrote: post #25
klochner wrote: post #19

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?

yes. it is. people can deny it or choose otherwise or say it's not politically correct, but it's true.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#47

Post by zura »

MaggieL wrote: post #4

It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills. I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012. I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.

eh, I foresee my comment from the not so far future:

I learned C++ in 1999 and it still does the job in 2055.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#48

Post by Turing_Machine »

varjag wrote: post #26
jlas wrote: post #2

This article is incredibly terse and uninformative. Why are older engineers having such a hard time? Are they keeping up with new technologies to remain competitive? What kind of engineering are we even talking about?

I witnessed three different engineers in two different companies turned down late in the interview process by upper management due to their age. Prior to that I ran the technical part of interview and green-lighted the candidates. The problem is real and when it happens, whatever skill set you have is irrelevant.

Your upper management is playing with fire if the candidates were over forty (at least in the U.S. -- other countries probably vary). That's just as illegal as turning them down because they happened to be female or black.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#49

Post by timr »

MetaCosm wrote: post #40
timr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we are reaching the golden age of the older developer. Companies are learning how much more great developers are worth than poor ones. Retention bonuses have gone crazy (getting a 3 year / 250k bonus package isn't even that interesting). The evergreen underpinnings, the basic knowledge of how to build systems floats through languages and technologies.

Agree with you about the value of older devs, but I wish I could say I saw "the industry" paying for experience. The examples of ridiculous grants I know about have all gone to people who are in their 20s and early 30s.

Granted, there's some selection bias going on: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA. That said: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#50

Post by rimantas »

lobotryas wrote: post #21
dyno12345 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like these people haven't been working in the field since they got the degree

They may have been working, however there's zero guarantee that they have been learning anything new or even spending hands-on time doing engineering work (as opposed to shuttling between meetings). I interview 2-3 candidates a week, including many people almost twice my age. While these older engineers have impressive-sounding resumes (IBM, Sun/Oracle) most struggle to code anything more complex than fizzubzz. In my…

  > Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple
  > JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page.
Somehow I doubt the result is different for younger ones.
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