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MIT alumni in their 50s

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#151

Post by chillingeffect »

chillingeffect wrote: post #74
thewarrior wrote: post #9

This post really scares me and part of me wants to quit this industry even though I enjoy coding. Ageism is a brutal reality.

It's not age, it's what you know (what value you deliver!). Some older people around me are pushing themselves as hard as when they were undergrads, attending online seminars, trying out new software platforms and tools. They're doing fine and still leading the conversation ahead of other people. The people getting replaced are the ones who aren't developing their skills. There's also a wage ceiling for software deve…

Would anyone mind elucidating why I was downvoted for this comment with no response? I feel it's truthful and respectfully stated. Several other comments agree with it.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#152

Post by hga »

sjg007 wrote: post #149
kvcc01 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record. Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with g…

Depends, sometimes you want a young pioneering doctor. Also sometimes you want an established software consultant. The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering some new value that someone will pay for.

From what I've heard, good surgical outcomes correlate more with experience in doing the procedure than anything else.

So unless you've got a problem amenable to surgery but without procedures with good outcomes for someone like you, you should prefer experience.

It may not be "new", but there's value in the higher probabilities of good outcomes.

In that, software development is very similar, except of course the stakes are fantastically lower.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#153

Post by [deleted] »

hga wrote: post #121
wobbleblob wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be your choice. At some point it becomes more and more difficult to get a job interview if you don't have more impressive sounding job titles on your resume.

What I discovered after I turned 35 was that erasing all evidence of my age from my resume made a massive difference in getting interviews. Of course, further success depended on being able to fake being young as fortunate genetics helped me to do. Just be careful about specifics in what you talked about, in a 2003 interview I slipped and mentioned PDP-11s, which prompted the interviewer to exclaim "Just how old are…

[deleted]

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#154

Post by Tad_Ghostly »

kvcc01 wrote: post #143
rayiner wrote: post #97

> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career. I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those…

If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record. Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with g…

> I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record.

Side note, probably irrelevant...it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers, but when I worked in Continuing Medical Education I learned that the group with the highest success rate for surgeries was docs with 3-5 years experience.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#155

Post by [deleted] »

discardorama wrote: post #147
[deleted] wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> Is the goal of a PhD really to get to tenure? Just a minor annoyance over calling people who chose to get a PhD knowing they would leave academia upon receiving it, drop outs. Times change. 30 years ago (the period in question here), if you got a CS PhD, your only options were to join an academic department or one of the few industrial labs (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.). Tenure-track positions were extremely hard t…

[deleted]

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#156

Post by ghaff »

dang wrote: post #132
jmorrison wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an MIT alum in my 50s, let me assure you that a specific fundraiser is assigned to target you, personally and individually. "Ugh," indeed.

> As an MIT alum in my 50s Well since we have a specimen handy, can we hear your take on the article? Does it match your observations?

I'm in the same range and I would have to say that most of the people who pop to mind (caveat--there's probably some selection bias) have done pretty well.

Among people from school who I've kept in touch with. One founded a significant company. Another is Chief Scientist of a large IT vendor. (And another was--retired now--Chief Scientist at a large consumer goods company.) A few are consultants of various types. One is still a game designer (though he actually started that after school; he was a civil engineer).

I also work with a fair number of people in the same general age range. I'm sure some percentage are still primarily coding although a lot are development managers of various sorts.

Personally I worked and a Mechanical engineer for a few years but I've done technical marketing of various sorts or strategic/marketing advisory work for most of my year. (I do some programming but strictly on the side.)

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#157

Post by mcguire »

hga wrote: post #125
mcguire wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of,…

Indeed. I've worked for more than one company that died because it didn't listen when I said, e.g., this won't work because math. In that case, simple multiplication and comparing the result to currently available IOPS. A lot of people just don't care until they actually crash into the brick wall, but in a start up that's frequently too late, and never fun. Our host pg has commented that more than a few dot.com failu…

Frequently, it's not technical. I have in mind one individual who still maintains a project management position at a former employer, who has repeatedly made every last project management mistake possible, right down to "adding people to a late project makes it later." It got to the point where I was uninterested in his latest fiasco because it was like 1980s sitcoms---a minor variation on something that wasn't all that funny the first time around.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#158

Post by mcguire »

ScottBurson wrote: post #142
mcguire wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of,…

I'd be interested to hear some specific examples if you care to post them.

Hired a new guy who had a few years of experience, but less than most of the existing folks (most of whom, admittedly, had the same one year, over and over). He immediately starts telling us how we should be doing things. Case in question: Maven.

Now, Maven is a nice enough tool and he's probably right in that it is the new "industry standard", but it doesn't do anything that we need to do better than Ant. (Making it easy to add new dependencies to a project, in particular, is something that I anti-want to do.) The only advantage, as far as I can see, would be to allow the new guy to use an IDE other than Eclipse. The costs are pretty large, though. It was an uphill struggle to get the cowboys to use any build system instead of Eclipse's export. This would be a new build system, a new project layout, and either we could convert everything, which exactly no one had time to do (and did I mention the one year of experience thing?) or just add Maven to the already gigantic ball of mud.

Carefully explaining all of that, plus the point that futzing around with build systems did nothing to help us get stuff out the door, which is what we were having problems with and what we hired him to do, led only to blank looks and his decision to "demonstrate the advantages" in the project he was working on---exactly the reason we have a ball-of-mud problem.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#159

Post by jedrek »

stared wrote: post #136
sixtypoundhound wrote: post #98

If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind... - The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went dir…

Some jobs are flexible, when you are judged on your current impact, some other - have guild constraints, where it takes time and effort to get into... but also, even with waning skill, once you are entrenched, it's hard to get out. IMHO the good thing for meritocracy is when there is no shift between skill and position. Eg in academia there is ~10-20 year shift.

I know couples working retail in small town America who are 8 years into their $45000 mortgages vs my buddy who was paying 60k a year in rent in SF.
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