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As much as I hate to say it: it's a healthy nightmare. I have it too, though I came to development late in my career (My career was more managing technologists

As much as I hate to say it: it's a healthy nightmare. I have it too, though I came to development late in my career (My career was more managing technologists in IT depts, but I turned out to be good with Oracle and PostgreSQL and other development tasks and now get more requests for that... which pays as well and is more fun to boot). When I was young, I would go into interviews sometimes where the other candidates where there in the lobby, too. Some were older and clearly had been in technology a long time... but never advanced past where they were in their "prime" as you made small talk. They weren't going to get the job nor should they have. They allowed themselves to become as relevant as token ring. As technologists we have to keep ourselves current. That keeping up with the kids is really part of our profession: the technology evolves quickly and so must we. But this is the part I like about technology work. There's always something next to keep things fresh. A new technology, a new architectural style, new needs, unsolvable problems that become solvable. Our profession doesn't tolerate coasting. Good. Other professions have this same problem, just not at our speed. The proverbial buggy whip makers had to evolve with changing realities... they just had more time to see the inevitable. (As an aside, I play poker with a dedicated COBOL developer in his mid-50s... so sometimes you can make old school pay, too :-) ).

michael_fine 11y ago
Even if it makes sense for a single company not to hire an old developer, we are losing so much values as an industry if we invest all this money into teaching valuable lessons to devs, then throwing them away and letting newer kids make the same mistakes.
- sbuttgereit 11y ago
  Yes and no. A guy/gal who spent a decade or two dealing with RPG on a 400 will have judgments contextually relevant to that technology environment. His experience and judgments will have limited applicability to say microservice based architectures on AWS. Yes there will be some generalities that will apply everywhere, but probably not enough to make up for the deficiencies of limited experiences outside of that 400 comfort zone. In fact, some of that prior experience may well prove harmful rather than beneficial in a different environment with different strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately technology is unlike some professions like, say, warehouse management or construction where techniques evolve with time, but there are more commonalities from one decade to the next. Technology sees highly disruptive change and so I would still argue that without keeping current in your knowledge, your experience has a very short half-life.
  - gaius 11y ago
    No it isn't, it really isn't. Take any website you like, it's a form for you to enter data to be stored into a database, and reports you can run to see this data. Facebook, Amazon, you name it. So it displays in a web browser rather than a 3270 terminal, that's the only difference, and it's a trivial one. Incidentally, what you call "microservices on AWS" is architecturally identical to how mainframes worked in the 1970s, you would do it with CICS. Much of the computer science, algorithms and datastructures, in every day use, were discovered in the 70s if not before. So either you have very limited experience of technology, or this is just ageism.
    - workitout 11y ago
      Well said, I stumbled across virtualization in the early 2000s and rediscovered what had been invented in the 60s. In the 80si created a compression algorithm only to find out it had been invented in the 60s. When I was under 30 I assumed everyone over 30 was brilliant and the often were. People under 30 today assume everyone over 30 is an idiot.
    - sbuttgereit 11y ago
      If you want to take generalities sure, nothing ever changes. We store data, we use electricity, etc. I can generalize away any detail and make myself look clever, too, but I also know the operating realities of those technologies of which I spoke involve details which are not so trivially disposed of and in practice they matter. Are there analogs between these technologies? Can we see echos of the green screen paradigm when we load a web page? Sure. But that's a long stretch from saying that implementation details are close enough to even say a majority of the information relevant from the old 400 days. As for me, I've run AS/400 shops (back when it was the AS400, but we did use newfangled 5250 emulators), been responsible for development in companies implementing highly distributed client/server based products, and most recently I've been involved in developing back end systems for web and iPhone applications (and, yes, on AWS in microservicey ways). I've been around technology plenty. I can tell you, too, that my early mistakes with AWS were precisely because I allowed my prior monolithic systems experience take too much precedence in my judgments when I first approached it. It was not the same. I needed to learn the new lessons; perhaps my only advantage was I recognized it quickly and recovered. It's not ageism, however, but a realism that recognizes that not all experience is the same or applicable to every situation: it takes continuous professional development to make that experience worth a shit. However, I can understand why you'd be a little overly defensive in your response however... being a developer of a certain age. Don't worry. I'm about the same age as you, as are many of my colleagues, and I don't think we're too worried about finding work.
gaius 11y ago
It's nightmarish because you can't control it - software is driven by fashion. You can carefully choose a good technology, patiently master it, then find there's no demand anymore because a technology that's worse in every objective measure, is getting all the blog posts and retweets this year, and all the people into it are reinventing the wheel you knew 20 or 30 years ago, all of them claiming to be innovating and inventing new stuff. Like the people who knew Smalltalk in the 90s and were poised to take software engineering to the next level but got stomped on by Java, say. Or the Perl people who were finally getting their act together with Modern Perl before they were stabbed in the back by the Perl 6 camp. There are dozens of examples. Sometimes it comes back around but if you knew ML in the 70s there was an awfully long wait for F# to go semi-mainstream...
- mccracken 11y ago
  I'm a grad getting in to webdev, and I find this fascinating - is it really that bad? Every company I've interviewed at so far has been lenient as long as you know how to solve a problem in a somewhat relevant lang/tech.
  - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
    I don't find it an issue at all, but I also do follow the current technology trends, at least to the level where I can talk about them intelligently.
  - bjwbell 11y ago
    Yes, no qualification. I've been part of the hiring process several times. Unless you're exceptional, hiring is brutal for older devs. I would worry about it and I'm only close to 30 but I'm self employed now.
    - mdpopescu 11y ago
      I am 44 years old. I go on an interview binge every couple of years or so, because I normally work remotely from home and I get bored with not having anyone to talk to (professionally). The last time I went on a series of interviews (in Dublin at the end of June 2015) I got about four NOs and six YESes. I think I'm a very good programmer but not an exceptional one :) I think it's more like Uncle Bob says: the number of programmer has doubled every five years. A consequence of that is that those of us who were in it for a long time (30 years in my case) appear to be surrounded by a sea of youngsters with no clue. Personally, I realized recently that not only I don't have a fear of losing my job - I'm starting to find it strange when others tell me about it. (I'm re-reading Clarke Ching's Rolling Rocks Downhill and I find it harder to empathize with the protagonist than it was a few years ago.)

michael_fine 11y ago

Even if it makes sense for a single company not to hire an old developer, we are losing so much values as an industry if we invest all this money into teaching valuable lessons to devs, then throwing them away and letting newer kids make the same mistakes.

sbuttgereit 11y ago
Yes and no. A guy/gal who spent a decade or two dealing with RPG on a 400 will have judgments contextually relevant to that technology environment. His experience and judgments will have limited applicability to say microservice based architectures on AWS. Yes there will be some generalities that will apply everywhere, but probably not enough to make up for the deficiencies of limited experiences outside of that 400 comfort zone. In fact, some of that prior experience may well prove harmful rather than beneficial in a different environment with different strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately technology is unlike some professions like, say, warehouse management or construction where techniques evolve with time, but there are more commonalities from one decade to the next. Technology sees highly disruptive change and so I would still argue that without keeping current in your knowledge, your experience has a very short half-life.
- gaius 11y ago
  No it isn't, it really isn't. Take any website you like, it's a form for you to enter data to be stored into a database, and reports you can run to see this data. Facebook, Amazon, you name it. So it displays in a web browser rather than a 3270 terminal, that's the only difference, and it's a trivial one. Incidentally, what you call "microservices on AWS" is architecturally identical to how mainframes worked in the 1970s, you would do it with CICS. Much of the computer science, algorithms and datastructures, in every day use, were discovered in the 70s if not before. So either you have very limited experience of technology, or this is just ageism.
  - workitout 11y ago
    Well said, I stumbled across virtualization in the early 2000s and rediscovered what had been invented in the 60s. In the 80si created a compression algorithm only to find out it had been invented in the 60s. When I was under 30 I assumed everyone over 30 was brilliant and the often were. People under 30 today assume everyone over 30 is an idiot.
  - sbuttgereit 11y ago
    If you want to take generalities sure, nothing ever changes. We store data, we use electricity, etc. I can generalize away any detail and make myself look clever, too, but I also know the operating realities of those technologies of which I spoke involve details which are not so trivially disposed of and in practice they matter. Are there analogs between these technologies? Can we see echos of the green screen paradigm when we load a web page? Sure. But that's a long stretch from saying that implementation details are close enough to even say a majority of the information relevant from the old 400 days. As for me, I've run AS/400 shops (back when it was the AS400, but we did use newfangled 5250 emulators), been responsible for development in companies implementing highly distributed client/server based products, and most recently I've been involved in developing back end systems for web and iPhone applications (and, yes, on AWS in microservicey ways). I've been around technology plenty. I can tell you, too, that my early mistakes with AWS were precisely because I allowed my prior monolithic systems experience take too much precedence in my judgments when I first approached it. It was not the same. I needed to learn the new lessons; perhaps my only advantage was I recognized it quickly and recovered. It's not ageism, however, but a realism that recognizes that not all experience is the same or applicable to every situation: it takes continuous professional development to make that experience worth a shit. However, I can understand why you'd be a little overly defensive in your response however... being a developer of a certain age. Don't worry. I'm about the same age as you, as are many of my colleagues, and I don't think we're too worried about finding work.

gaius 11y ago

It's nightmarish because you can't control it - software is driven by fashion. You can carefully choose a good technology, patiently master it, then find there's no demand anymore because a technology that's worse in every objective measure, is getting all the blog posts and retweets this year, and all the people into it are reinventing the wheel you knew 20 or 30 years ago, all of them claiming to be innovating and inventing new stuff. Like the people who knew Smalltalk in the 90s and were poised to take software engineering to the next level but got stomped on by Java, say. Or the Perl people who were finally getting their act together with Modern Perl before they were stabbed in the back by the Perl 6 camp. There are dozens of examples. Sometimes it comes back around but if you knew ML in the 70s there was an awfully long wait for F# to go semi-mainstream...

mccracken 11y ago
I'm a grad getting in to webdev, and I find this fascinating - is it really that bad? Every company I've interviewed at so far has been lenient as long as you know how to solve a problem in a somewhat relevant lang/tech.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  I don't find it an issue at all, but I also do follow the current technology trends, at least to the level where I can talk about them intelligently.
- bjwbell 11y ago
  Yes, no qualification. I've been part of the hiring process several times. Unless you're exceptional, hiring is brutal for older devs. I would worry about it and I'm only close to 30 but I'm self employed now.
  - mdpopescu 11y ago
    I am 44 years old. I go on an interview binge every couple of years or so, because I normally work remotely from home and I get bored with not having anyone to talk to (professionally). The last time I went on a series of interviews (in Dublin at the end of June 2015) I got about four NOs and six YESes. I think I'm a very good programmer but not an exceptional one :) I think it's more like Uncle Bob says: the number of programmer has doubled every five years. A consequence of that is that those of us who were in it for a long time (30 years in my case) appear to be surrounded by a sea of youngsters with no clue. Personally, I realized recently that not only I don't have a fear of losing my job - I'm starting to find it strange when others tell me about it. (I'm re-reading Clarke Ching's Rolling Rocks Downhill and I find it harder to empathize with the protagonist than it was a few years ago.)