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Sucks to be an old engineer

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Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#151

Post by vacri »

tibbon wrote: post #99

Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit. At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem. New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough…

I'm 40, but I'm not about to tell a 55-year-old what it's like to try and find employment as a 55-year-old. Just saying 'keep yourself current' is missing a lot of the picture.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#152

Post by vonmoltke »

_delirium wrote: post #89
rayiner wrote: post #6

This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk): 1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3) Start a company. My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process…

Much of my family are in chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and similar engineering fields, and from what I can tell just about the opposite is true. The companies would much rather hire someone back out of retirement as a consultant at 3x their previous salary, than train up someone younger. They'll hire someone younger, but seemingly as a last resort. This seems most true in a few specific fields (e.g. me…

From my interactions with the O&G industry, primarily upstream, there is growing concern that the knowledge base is too old and that they are not getting enough young professionals into the pipeline to cover for the engineers who will, in the next 10 - 15 years, simply be too old to work. It is one of the big goals of the Society of Petroleum Engineers right now, and has quite a bit of support from Halliburton and Chevron.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#153

Post by michaelochurch »

vonmoltke wrote: post #148
michaelochurch wrote: post #118

I see our age discrimination problem as the fundamental sign of us being a defeated tribe. Ageism is one of those horrible traits of management culture (i.e. if you have a younger boss, you're a loser) that we wouldn't face if we had kept our tribal integrity (because "bosses" would be coordinators and mentors, not hierarchical superiors, making age irrelevant.) Good programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-…

> Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts. Not only that, but social media will hire the college dropout with an impressive Github portfolio while the cancer research institute will shitcan any resume that doesn't have an MS or PhD on it.

It's really disturbing to realize what has happened to the sciences. The death of the scientific/academic job market is why us smart people hate "business douches" so much; the fuckers shut down all the R&D. Those assholes struck first.

(To be fair, plenty of businesspeople do more good for the world than bad and aren't douches. It's the shitty ones that have no better ideas than to cut costs recklessly. The problem is that no one shuts them down.)

In the 1970s, there were Bachelor-level science jobs. There was an expectation, of course, that most people would go back for graduate degrees; but it gave people a chance to spend a few years in the field and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives before committing to a graduate program.

Those Bachelor-level science jobs still exist. The problem is that they're all filled by PhDs.

Even most of this Silicon Valley "innovation" in social media isn't half as interesting as the stuff marketers did in the Mad Men era. M&A replacing R&D is one of the worst social developments around.

Who's going to bring back Real Technology? Someone will see the value in doing so, I hope.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#154

Post by vonmoltke »

SiVal wrote: post #113
smcl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPA seems to be an American thing. I graduated Uni in 2007 (in Scotland) and I've never been asked mine.

No, it's a Google thing. No American company has ever asked for my GPA, but the Google HR person next door said that if I wanted to interview for a job at Google, HR would demand my GPA (from decades ago!) and would not grant an interview unless it was above some (secret) threshold. If their recruiters reached out to me, HR would still require the GPA, but she said that the interviewers might not care about it.

What stage of interview? I have had two phone screens with Google recruiters, and one actual phone interview. Nobody ever asked for my GPA, and my degree is from a university most people here have probably never heard of (and is EE, to boot).

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#155

Post by samfisher1906 »

samfisher83 wrote: post #87
Angostura wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer. Alternatively, choose the older engineer with the experience to know: "You know what? Fundamentally, what we're building here is the same as this thing from 10 years ago".

Yes everything seems to go full circle from mainframe to PC to the cloud (Mainframes). It may be the same problem but someone younger might know how to tailor that solution to the younger generation. The other thing is all these founders are so young they may lack the experience or maturity to hire an older person.

I work at a software company that most likely will be bankrupt by year end due to a young developer's desire to rewrite our flagship product from the ground up using "new" technology. Three years later this new product has 40% of the functionality of the pervious version and has customers canceling contracts that have been with us for 10+ years.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#156

Post by kp27 »

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.

MaggieL,

  As a guy in his 30's it would be interesting to read more on how you did this. Were you laid off at any point? Did you learn Scala on your own or through a previous employer, or a class? And finally, how hard was it for you to make your transition & land this job?
I find myself having to learn new skills with things changing every ~5yrs. Its scary, but also quite interesting to see things fork SO MUCH so fast lately. I feel its exponential...I'm basing this on only 2+ iterations, lets see how my 3rd ends up.

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#158

Post by qwerta »

Age discrimination is sometimes even publicly announced. For example European Space Agency has age limit for recruitment 55 years. This applies even to desk based jobs such as administrative or software developement.

Extract from job description:

- The European Space Agency is an equal opportunity employer

- Contracts Officer in the Procurement Department, Directorate of Procurement, Financial Operations and Legal Affairs

- preparing requests for offers/invitations to tender;

- dealing with administrative, contractual, legal and industrial problems arising from the procurements concerned.

- Under ESA Regulations, the age limit for recruitment is 55.

More at: http://www.esa.int/hr/PDF/ESA-VN-ESTEC-2012-091,REV.1.pdf

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#159

Post by ycombobreaker »

timr wrote: post #64
arn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 young…

"Medical knowledge does change relatively quickly and standards of care change a lot." You have to be clear about the relative rate of change, though: it's nothing like software, where technical knowledge from a decade ago is completely irrelevant today. Medical appointments are pretty much the same as when I was a kid. The more important point, for me, is judgment: older doctors are far less goofy and spastic than y…

> Medical appointments are pretty much the same as when I was a kid.

I have a young child, and I have had enough conversations with doctors and nurses to see that standards for medical care _do_ change rapidly enough to matter. Some examples:

- At the hospital where my wife gave birth, the SOP is an epidural and continuous fetal monitoring. This means that very little equipment is available which supports mobility. The hospital staff had a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea _lying on your back is painful_ for someone in labor. The human body hasn't changed, but the medical practices are currently optimized around the assumption of an epidural and keeping to a schedule. Doctors who have let this assumption ossify will force the hands of patients who simply don't know otherwise.

- My pediatrician's practice currently recommends avoiding peanut butter until age... three? I think. However, there is recent research on some children of Jewish ancestry in the UK vs. Israel, suggesting that their very low rates of peanut butter allergy are probably due to environment rather than a genetic predisposition. If further studies confirm that finding, the AMA will probably revise its suggestions, causing all pediatricians to start offering the _opposite_ advice.

- Recent research (sorry, don't have the reference) showed higher rates of food-related allergies when children were exposed to solid foods earlier than 3 months.

[edit for list formatting]

Re: Sucks to be an old engineer

#160

Post by ilaksh »

timr wrote: post #24
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?

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'm 35. I started learning SQL, C, C++, memory management etc. many years ago when I was a teenager.

However, and I know that people will take the opportunity to disrespect me for this, but I realized, after playing around with 3d C++ graphics in college, that I wanted to build interactive desktop applications quickly. So I learned to use a very powerful tool called Visual Basic 6. Not because I didn't understand memory management or anything else, but because it was a better software engineering decision for most projects since it allowed me to not repeat solving the same problems that had already been solved.

I know people aren't going to be able to understand this because of the reputation that Visual Basic has, and they will lose respect for me, but I am going to go ahead and say it anyway. Visual Basic 6 was and still is a better software engineering tool than C++. Why? One of the core principles of software engineering is DRY. Manual memory management means you are repeating yourself. It also means you are doing the memory management yourself rather than letting the computer do it for you. Another reason why Visual Basic 6 is superior software engineering over C or C++ is the component models.

I eventually moved on to .NET and C# because of the stigma of VB and also because the new frameworks provided better tools.

Eventually I realized that the closed source world of desktop Microsoft development was outdated since it was tied to one platform and old-fashioned business models. So I moved into web development. The most practical tool for web development was PHP. It was the best software engineering decision to select PHP to build a web application. Because it allowed me to avoid solving the same problems that many other engineers had already been faced with and solved on their own. Something that many software engineers don't understand is that not only is it important not to repeat yourself in your own code, but not to repeat solving the same problems other people have already solved for you.

So then I wanted to build a realtime interactive collaborative software application in the web browser. Because that is the most compelling, useful, and challenging type of application. So I tried to do it with PHP. Very awkward. I tried to use another popular server-side tool, Python. Again it turned out to be very awkward to do realtime collaborative software applications with Python (using things like Twisted).

So when I heard about this thing called Node.js that was built from the ground up to take full advantage of the single-threaded but asynchronous programming model of JavaScript as well as powerful underlying evented non-blocking I/O C libraries, I had to try it. Guess what? All of that software engineering done by the people who wrote those C libraries and the people who put together JavaScript and Node means that there are a lot of problems that I don't have to solve to write performant IO-intensive code on the back end! Continuation-based programming in JavaScript and Node.js just works better and is more maintainable (less code and less complexity) than the other solutions.

So I'm sorry, but if you're not adopting new programming languages, tools and frameworks, then I don't think you are a good software engineer. Because good software engineers only solve the problems that they have to, and don't continue to solve the same problems over and over.

Now -- NoSQL. So, it turns out that NONE of the many software applications I built over the years using Oracle, SQL Server or MySQL actually required 'real' db-level transactions or even involved very large datasets. And I believe that is the case for most programmers (not all of course). These days that is still true. Also, these days I only code in JavaScript (mostly CoffeeScript really). So when I heard about things like MongoDB that allowed me to store JSON directly, skip the object relational layer, and not even have to define a schema ahead of time, I had to seriously consider whether I needed a normalized relational database, SQL, to constantly reiterate joins, etc. When you examine it logically, it turns out that we were actually doing all of those things just because THAT WAS HOW YOU DID IT. With the current ecosystem of JavaScript and JSON, it is BAD SOFTWARE ENGINEERING for the MAJORITY of software projects to use a relational database, joins, etc. Why is it bad software engineering? Because you are creating a bunch of problems for yourself that you wouldn't have if you used a different set of tools.

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