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An honest personal assessment: the bird has flown on your days as a pure coder. Even if you don't particularly want a management position, focus on that aspect
by daxfohl 11y ago
An honest personal assessment: the bird has flown on your days as a pure coder. Even if you don't particularly want a management position, focus on that aspect of your career. It's going to be hard to convince a prospective company that you're worth the money as a developer if all you have to offer is 12 years of ASP.
I ran the software dept for a small consulting company and yes you'd probably never get a call back from me if you were applying purely as a developer. While we have hired late 30-somethings developers, it's usually because they offer some fairly unique tech skillset (i.e., a few years of production-quality FPGA experience, not a couple months dorking around with "whatever hot new technology" on github--that's something I look for in a fresh-grad). So I think for a purely tech role, beyond getting another job at a similar company doing similar tech, you're a long shot at best.
But beyond that, the one thing that would case me to look at your resume is if you were wanting a leadership position and had the corresponding soft skills and experience. It sounds like you do, so highlight that, and work on it. The advantage there is that management skills: talking to stakeholders, setting expectations and timeframes, finalizing deliverables...are all applicable no matter what the underlying technology. So there's no reason you'd have to limit yourself to ASP management roles.
My previous company had lots of young developers doing engineering with lots of new technologies, but they'd have never delivered a thing had they not been guided by some experienced devs who actually spent most of their time in Excel (or trello or Jira or whatever we happened to be using to manage the particular project).
- RefactorCareer 11y agoThanks for the honest assessment. It's definitely something I need to consider.
- matwood 11y agoYou mention age, but then go on to say skillset. Do you mean to say regardless of skillset you are going to pass on 30-somethings? Now that the computing field is finally aging, there are going to be more and more 30/40/50 somethings pure coders. Passing on them because age alone is a huge mistake in my mind.
- daxfohl 11y agoThis is distinctly the opposite of what I said. We have hired 30-somethings based on skillsets. We have also hired 30-somethings based on soft skills. We would not hire 30-something "pure developers" based on "potential, potentially outside their skillset" though because it's far cheaper to hire fresh grads, and you just have to assume that someone in their late 30's that's looking to change is just a burnout. It's a tough world.
- ianphughes 11y agoI have programmed on all kinds of stacks, and while I understand a lot of the .NET disdain, I’m perplexed by perceptions that years of .NET experience is somehow worthless or less than noteworthy? Beyond the stigma of being a Microsoft product, there seems to be a misconception that .NET devs are dragging and dropping junk through an IDE. Why wouldn’t their "12 years of ASP" include obtaining good debugging habits, writing readable code, building production ready systems that still perform at scale, and a knack for constant improvement? Someone who is a craftsman on one tool will share many qualities with a craftsman from another.
- daxfohl 11y agoI'm not saying that the world is fair, or unfair, or even that I'm fair, or unfair. I'm just saying that as a person (with limited time as we all are) who works for a small fairly innovative consulting company, a resume that shows 12 years of ASP dev will get pushed to the back of the list. I don't have an HR dept. That person may be a perfect fit. This is the guy's best possible chance. Nonetheless, I have limited time and will interview fresh-outs or jr devs with more diverse skillsets first, and an old-dog ASP dev only as a last resort. Diamond in the rough? Well, I have no idea about the diamond thing, all I know upfront is it's certainly the rough, and probably not worth my time.
- scarface74 11y agoI don't think it's a disdain for .Net. It's more of a disdain for ASP.Net Webforms. I'm definitely not a youngster (I'm 41). But he's been doing Asp.Net Webforms for 12 years. He hasn't shown a "knack for constant improvement". He hasn't been keeping up with the frameworks and technologies that MS has been pushing - Asp.Net MVC, WebApi, Entity Framework, etc. If he has been doing WebForms instead of MVC, he's probably not up on all of the basic table stakes client side stuff like BootStrap and JQuery. I know at 41 years old, if I want to stay in development and not go into management and command the salary I want, I can't be complacent. The minute that my company stagnates, I must find another job. That means for me, being a full stack .Net developer: 1. Web - Angular, JQuery, CSS, TypeScript, and Bootstrap 2. Server side web - Asp.Net MVC, WebApi, WCF 3. Knowing how to speak the language of an architect (DDD, Design Patterns,everything that Martin Fowler writes) 4. Database theory and maintenance and EF. 5. Testing - front end and back end automation testing. I'm not bragging, I know lots of developers who can tick off these checkboxes. If you're not willing to aggressive learn, this isn't the field for you.