51–60 of 242 posts
OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer, because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.
"""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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under the hood.
That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will hire him in a second given the chance.
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 especial…
You had me until "nudist." Dare I ask?
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.
They spend two weeks on changes like, "Modify program P90182 to set value 82 instead of value 81 in field CONVEXITY", dutifully put in their change request documents and then move on to the next change honestly believing they're earning their inflated salary.
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.
One of the sharpest developers I have ever worked with -- was 63. He did only mobile development and only would agree to work 30 hours a week. When I pressed him on it, he explained that he liked to constantly be working on both Android and iOS projects, 30 hours a week each, and that kept his backlog of waiting clients happy. EDIT: He completed the iOS application under budget with wonderful tests.
"""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?
Why does Google still care about people's undergraduate GPAs from 25 years ago? When my friend interviewed at Google (they did hire him), the recruiter wanted to know how many hours per week he worked (to pay his tuition) at university 25 years ago to account for his "low" undergraduate GPA (3.0 - 3.5).