4 ms·

I'm approaching 40 and this is something I think about a lot. In fact this is something that everyone should think about. Everyone, assuming you are lucky eno

I'm approaching 40 and this is something I think about a lot. In fact this is something that everyone should think about. Everyone, assuming you are lucky enough, will get older. The person you reject because they are over 40 today will be you in 10 years. If you pass on someone due to their age you can't turn around and get mad when some other 20 year old does the same. Whenever I interview someone I always ask myself, if I was the person across the table from me would I think I got a fair shot during this interview. Having said that, this is a two way street. You need to be aware of what your skill set is. I took the Scott Adams career advice [0] to try and be in the top 25% in two areas. In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. [0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

debacle 11y ago
If your skillset is FoxPro DB support, as long as you're willing to move around, you can make good money. Being really good at old technology is a good way to make a lot of money. Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.
akg_67 11y ago
> In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.
- chollida1 11y ago
  > How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:) :) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    If your life gets off the well beaten track, (your deviation from) people's expectations will fuck you.
    - wott 11y ago
      I know this from experience. I am still experiencing it and I can't see it improving any time soon. Or ever. :-/
  - akg_67 11y ago
    Your choice of what you should be doing after 40+ should be based on not only what interests you but also what your environment may expect when you reach 40+. Looking at what 40+ people doing at your company gives you a clue of what is expected of you when you turn 40. Hedge fund might be an exception like academics and research. In most non-research oriented companies you will see more 40+ in management than in programming. Like you mentioned FoxPro people having bad time, even if you are skilled in latest 'programming' trend, a company might prefer (IME, most of the time it is true) someone younger than a 40+ in that role. For most companies, the marginal utility of a person plateaus or declines after about 5-7 years of progressive experience.
    - trav4225 11y ago
      What if the person only entered the field at age 35? I'm not sure physical age is relevant. Also, many people, myself included, find the thought of working at the management level highly distasteful.
      - akg_67 11y ago
        People hire people like them. It is not as much as the absolute age but the age group and difference in your age with rest of your peer group in the company. If you entered a field at 35 (appear 35) when most of the peer group in the company is 21, you are going to have hard time getting hired for same role being performed by 21. If the company that expects/has most 40+ employees in management, you are going to have hard time staying in technical role unless you have built bridges with management that want to keep you around.
- jazzdog 11y ago
  Is your point that 40+ aren't doing Math and Programming, so one should not aspire to be doing that at 40+? But why aren't 40+ doing Math and Programming? Because they've moved on to other challenges, or because they are being replaced? Aren't we back to the original point?
mbrutsch 11y ago
I'm early 50s, and I've "learned and discarded" several decades of skills: 8/16-bit assemblers, the entire DEC range of computers, MUMPS and the VA ecosystem, the Perl craze of the early 2000s; I'm in an Oracle/Ruby shop now, and I suspect I'll be learning something new in a few years. Only way to keep up in this field, throw out the details, keep the concepts, gird the loins and hit the books. Well google, no one uses dead trees anymore. I have almost 100 lbs of "replaced by google" books sitting under my carport waiting to be recycled, becuse even schools don't want them.
- dboreham 11y ago
  I loaded up my truck with the books a couple of years ago and took them to the dump (no recycling of bound paper here). I still have my Vax though, and copies of Knuth, K&R, ...
- jazzdog 11y ago
  I have been programming since the late 70s. I will say, some folks my age should be discarded, not because they're old, but because they've refused to keep up their skill sets. Many of my friends, whom I worked with in the 80s, are still scrounging around for whatever RPG AS/400 jobs are left. I shake my head. I'm having more fun than ever developing these days. Angular and Typescript of late. And it'll be some new framework in a year and a half. Other folks I talk to complain that they've been replaced by outsourced Indians. A little bit further probing reveals that "well they moved it to Java, and I'm a Cobal programmer, I don't want to learn Java". I shake my head some more. I'm not helping the cause here, I guess. Just some random observations.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    I'm a fairly young programmer, but I have almost the opposite perspective. Tools should be chosen because they offer pragmatic benefit for a particular purpose (usually for servicing a desired business outcome). But in the majority of jobs, tools are chosen for reasons of status and affiliation. Even two of the tools you mentioned, Angular and Typescript, are often derided by proponents of newer, trendier tools. There's also an issue between the experience / what a person can accomplish for you vs. insistence on integration with a particular framework. If someone is a COBOL programmer and can demonstrably solve my problem more expediently with COBOL than by slowly plugging into my pre-existing Java system, then I should want them to work in COBOL and I should solve the problem of integrating disparate systems instead of effectively removing the comparative advantage that the COBOL expert brought to the table by forcing them to do things in my Java system for reasons of uniformity and standardization. Obviously this is a simplification. For example, I enjoy programming in Haskell, but it's hard for employers to locate good Haskell programmers and so there is some extra hiring risk if you agree to bring Haskell into your family of tools. That's not trivial, but it is often deeply over stated. And the actual specifics of that kind of risk are rarely analyzed or considered -- as opposed to just rattling off a glib dismissal based solely on the mere fact that a risk, in principle, even exists at all, because dismissing for this reason is probably convenient to someone else's political power play to re-org around Java or something. Many enterprise technology investment decisions are very bad decisions that are made by non-technical people for purposes of nepotism, status signalling, and creating bonus fuel for middle management and executives. The newer and sexier the technology, the better. Or, if new and sexy doesn't work, then buy a brand, like IBM, regardless of whether it actually fits your needs. I find that most programmers are very happy to learn new things and are even motivated to do it and find it pleasant. But most programmers also cannot deal with being forced to learn clearly and unequivocally inferior tools that don't have redeeming engineering trade-off pragmatism to support their adoption -- which is the majority of modern frameworks, new languages, and libraries. You can say "get with the times" but it's just the wrong diagnosis. "Getting with the times" generally means being underpaid and overworked in order to take poorly designed tools and use them to cram square pegs into round holes. Some people call it "gainful employment" and if it doesn't make you feel soul-crushingly miserable, that's great for you. But other people call it "talent wasting graveyard that will cause me to die early from a life of absurdly needless stress" and they seek other careers. I wouldn't judge those COBOL programmers the way you are. They have a comparative advantage with COBOL and know its pragmatic use. If they recognize ways of solving a problem better without dealing with enterprise Java inanity, and their economic preferences imply that it's just not worth it for them to be overworked and underpaid if they are also forced to use an inferior tool, then they are being perfectly rational. You are trying to characterize it as "adapt or die" but the reality is that many modern software shops are just graveyards, so it is "adapt and die" -- at least by refusing to adapt, you might find some more pleasing way to spend your time before you die. (I'd argue the same goes for other trends too -- like the way start-up jobs are becoming cult-like lifestyle communes, and how basic human needs like privacy are required to be sublimated away in awful open-plan surveillance offices. "Adapting" to "tolerate" these things is a bad outcome -- and for many it's a far worse outcome than being unemployed or having a very hard time with job searching).
gedy 11y ago
Frankly, what I've seen is less about older people stale skills as it is people having a family and a life outside of the office after 5PM. Many, many places implicitly reward long hours of (inefficient) desk time, and equate that with "hard work". Probably also big part of women leaving the workplace after having kids.
- akg_67 11y ago
  Yep, one of my 55+ friend was laid off last month by a startup. While 20-25 year old coworkers in his group were being fed free pizza and Redbull to encourage working late in the night, he had to go to his family in the evening.

debacle 11y ago

If your skillset is FoxPro DB support, as long as you're willing to move around, you can make good money. Being really good at old technology is a good way to make a lot of money. Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.

akg_67 11y ago

> In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.

chollida1 11y ago
> How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:) :) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?
- maxerickson 11y ago
  If your life gets off the well beaten track, (your deviation from) people's expectations will fuck you.
  - wott 11y ago
    I know this from experience. I am still experiencing it and I can't see it improving any time soon. Or ever. :-/
- akg_67 11y ago
  Your choice of what you should be doing after 40+ should be based on not only what interests you but also what your environment may expect when you reach 40+. Looking at what 40+ people doing at your company gives you a clue of what is expected of you when you turn 40. Hedge fund might be an exception like academics and research. In most non-research oriented companies you will see more 40+ in management than in programming. Like you mentioned FoxPro people having bad time, even if you are skilled in latest 'programming' trend, a company might prefer (IME, most of the time it is true) someone younger than a 40+ in that role. For most companies, the marginal utility of a person plateaus or declines after about 5-7 years of progressive experience.
  - trav4225 11y ago
    What if the person only entered the field at age 35? I'm not sure physical age is relevant. Also, many people, myself included, find the thought of working at the management level highly distasteful.
    - akg_67 11y ago
      People hire people like them. It is not as much as the absolute age but the age group and difference in your age with rest of your peer group in the company. If you entered a field at 35 (appear 35) when most of the peer group in the company is 21, you are going to have hard time getting hired for same role being performed by 21. If the company that expects/has most 40+ employees in management, you are going to have hard time staying in technical role unless you have built bridges with management that want to keep you around.
jazzdog 11y ago
Is your point that 40+ aren't doing Math and Programming, so one should not aspire to be doing that at 40+? But why aren't 40+ doing Math and Programming? Because they've moved on to other challenges, or because they are being replaced? Aren't we back to the original point?

mbrutsch 11y ago

I'm early 50s, and I've "learned and discarded" several decades of skills: 8/16-bit assemblers, the entire DEC range of computers, MUMPS and the VA ecosystem, the Perl craze of the early 2000s; I'm in an Oracle/Ruby shop now, and I suspect I'll be learning something new in a few years. Only way to keep up in this field, throw out the details, keep the concepts, gird the loins and hit the books. Well google, no one uses dead trees anymore. I have almost 100 lbs of "replaced by google" books sitting under my carport waiting to be recycled, becuse even schools don't want them.

dboreham 11y ago
I loaded up my truck with the books a couple of years ago and took them to the dump (no recycling of bound paper here). I still have my Vax though, and copies of Knuth, K&R, ...
jazzdog 11y ago
I have been programming since the late 70s. I will say, some folks my age should be discarded, not because they're old, but because they've refused to keep up their skill sets. Many of my friends, whom I worked with in the 80s, are still scrounging around for whatever RPG AS/400 jobs are left. I shake my head. I'm having more fun than ever developing these days. Angular and Typescript of late. And it'll be some new framework in a year and a half. Other folks I talk to complain that they've been replaced by outsourced Indians. A little bit further probing reveals that "well they moved it to Java, and I'm a Cobal programmer, I don't want to learn Java". I shake my head some more. I'm not helping the cause here, I guess. Just some random observations.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I'm a fairly young programmer, but I have almost the opposite perspective. Tools should be chosen because they offer pragmatic benefit for a particular purpose (usually for servicing a desired business outcome). But in the majority of jobs, tools are chosen for reasons of status and affiliation. Even two of the tools you mentioned, Angular and Typescript, are often derided by proponents of newer, trendier tools. There's also an issue between the experience / what a person can accomplish for you vs. insistence on integration with a particular framework. If someone is a COBOL programmer and can demonstrably solve my problem more expediently with COBOL than by slowly plugging into my pre-existing Java system, then I should want them to work in COBOL and I should solve the problem of integrating disparate systems instead of effectively removing the comparative advantage that the COBOL expert brought to the table by forcing them to do things in my Java system for reasons of uniformity and standardization. Obviously this is a simplification. For example, I enjoy programming in Haskell, but it's hard for employers to locate good Haskell programmers and so there is some extra hiring risk if you agree to bring Haskell into your family of tools. That's not trivial, but it is often deeply over stated. And the actual specifics of that kind of risk are rarely analyzed or considered -- as opposed to just rattling off a glib dismissal based solely on the mere fact that a risk, in principle, even exists at all, because dismissing for this reason is probably convenient to someone else's political power play to re-org around Java or something. Many enterprise technology investment decisions are very bad decisions that are made by non-technical people for purposes of nepotism, status signalling, and creating bonus fuel for middle management and executives. The newer and sexier the technology, the better. Or, if new and sexy doesn't work, then buy a brand, like IBM, regardless of whether it actually fits your needs. I find that most programmers are very happy to learn new things and are even motivated to do it and find it pleasant. But most programmers also cannot deal with being forced to learn clearly and unequivocally inferior tools that don't have redeeming engineering trade-off pragmatism to support their adoption -- which is the majority of modern frameworks, new languages, and libraries. You can say "get with the times" but it's just the wrong diagnosis. "Getting with the times" generally means being underpaid and overworked in order to take poorly designed tools and use them to cram square pegs into round holes. Some people call it "gainful employment" and if it doesn't make you feel soul-crushingly miserable, that's great for you. But other people call it "talent wasting graveyard that will cause me to die early from a life of absurdly needless stress" and they seek other careers. I wouldn't judge those COBOL programmers the way you are. They have a comparative advantage with COBOL and know its pragmatic use. If they recognize ways of solving a problem better without dealing with enterprise Java inanity, and their economic preferences imply that it's just not worth it for them to be overworked and underpaid if they are also forced to use an inferior tool, then they are being perfectly rational. You are trying to characterize it as "adapt or die" but the reality is that many modern software shops are just graveyards, so it is "adapt and die" -- at least by refusing to adapt, you might find some more pleasing way to spend your time before you die. (I'd argue the same goes for other trends too -- like the way start-up jobs are becoming cult-like lifestyle communes, and how basic human needs like privacy are required to be sublimated away in awful open-plan surveillance offices. "Adapting" to "tolerate" these things is a bad outcome -- and for many it's a far worse outcome than being unemployed or having a very hard time with job searching).

gedy 11y ago

Frankly, what I've seen is less about older people stale skills as it is people having a family and a life outside of the office after 5PM. Many, many places implicitly reward long hours of (inefficient) desk time, and equate that with "hard work". Probably also big part of women leaving the workplace after having kids.

akg_67 11y ago
Yep, one of my 55+ friend was laid off last month by a startup. While 20-25 year old coworkers in his group were being fed free pizza and Redbull to encourage working late in the night, he had to go to his family in the evening.