12 ms·

I'd hate to think that readers over 50 feel the need to consider leaving the tech workforce, and I know perhaps hundreds of successful engineers over 50. Those

• akshat_h 8y ago
  I have always wondered this. Tech and probably other fields do want you to be promoted. From what I have heard, if you are not able to get promoted in certain number of years, you are put on a PIP and possibly laid off. But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens? Just the fact that the numbers in the pipeline is always reducing suggests to me that some people get laid off and never find a job? Is that true? If not, what exactly is happening? I am still at the one of the lowest levels on the totem pole, so maybe I am missing something obvious here.
  • taurath 8y ago
    I work with senior engineers who are in their late 20s, and mid level devs in their 40s - I feel like the idea that a career path always has to have an upward trajectory is a bit of a farce - there are a lot of companies full of people who have kids, are competent, but don’t really want to take on the extra responsibility and time.
    • toomuchtodo 8y ago
      At some point, you realize your family is more important than a few extra dollars and an org chart.
  • idunno246 8y ago
    Senior is considered a terminal role in most companies in terms of required promotions, so you don’t have to get promoted again. Staff and principal is a different job kinda like management is, so at/after the senior level it’s splitting into 3 - managers, staff, and senior ICs, hence numbers go down.
  • ummonk 8y ago
    > But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens? More and more people going into software engineering than in previous generations.
  • lproven 8y ago
    This is a real issue. In journalism, the career path is jr writer, writer, sr writer, jr editor, sr editor -- and then you go do management. I was the IT Manager of a London stockbroker in the City by 26 years old. I didn't like it and ultimately quit. But the expected career path for many companies is to go from being a "mere" techie to being a manager. If you don't want to do that, then age becomes a big problem. I changed track to journalism, not knowing that the Web was going to kill the computer magazine industry within a decade. But short term, it was a good move, and I loved it.
• FLUX-YOU 8y ago
  >A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late. Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these projects seem to have less commitment to their technical decisions long-term. If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind.
  • ropeadopepope 8y ago
    I would be very curious to see how many 50 year old engineers are doing web development. I'm only 34 and my experience the past 5 years is that experience is not respected and being out of your 20s makes you a poor culture fit for most web companies. > If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind. I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they do change. I did a bit of Java/Hibernate work 8+ years ago. I look at modern Java code bases now and it's so annotation heavy I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
    • antonkm 8y ago
      I'm mid-thirties and was recently asked to teach a 50 yo best practices for development in Node. And not like Node specific patterns, but more like how to handle http requests. I'm pretty sure that guy is way above my skill set - he's smart and he has 15 years of work experience on me. I turned the offer down since I would have looked like a fool, like a kid teaching an adult how to drive. The age bias is real.
      • Pyxl101 8y ago
        It sounds like you missed an opportunity there. Just because someone has XX years of work experience doesn't mean that they know a particular technology stack. Perhaps this could have been a great opportunity for you to teach that person your skillset, while learning things from them in return. The best mentorships are bidirectional. While humans are growing up, we're accustomed to view our "elders" as our superiors in all respects. Childhood teachers encourage this view. However, at the point when you enter the workforce, in my opinion you should set these ideas aside and treat everyone as a peer; and keep your mind open to the idea that both people may have something to learn from the other.
• 0x4f3759df 8y ago
  A friend of mine is content maintaining a legacy VB app and has been at it since college -- about 20 years now. I hope he never gets laid off.
  • monort 8y ago
    They will probably easily find another legacy VB app to maintain, it's like COBOL that never dies.
• lkrubner 8y ago
  This is written in defiance of quite a few reports of the opposite. Employers want many things from employees, including a low wage, an ability to work 60 hours a week, and an absence of health problems. Also skills, but a company that only needs someone who is highly skilled can hire a high priced consultant. Of those, there is no need for loyalty whereas for salary jobs, loyalty seems to be very important. Among older tech workers I know, I see a growing divide in their career tracks. A few become high priced consultants and charge between $200 to $300 an hour. The rest are in jobs where they are just hoping they don’t get fired. See recent stories about IBM.
• wenc 8y ago
  > discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation I can't speak in general, but I have observed in my circles that this is at least somewhat true, and for altogether natural reasons. Most people, once they hit their late 30s or 40s, family (if they have one) takes priority and they don't have as much time to dedicate to going to Meetup groups, conferences or late nights spent gaining proficiency in new technologies. In general having kids vastly reduces one's free time. Knowing a technology deeply requires many hours of intentional practice, commitment and energy, which many if not most people in that age range with families don't have a lot of at their disposal. Their "tech growth rate" slows down considerably relative to when they were in their 20s. For example, I've noticed many SQL DBAs of a certain age have a hard time learning distributed databases because they often expect something familiar (databases are databases, right?) yet find themselves having to bone up on so many new concepts (that CS degree was so long ago) that many give up. Only the truly dedicated, truly passionate and truly nerdy persist, but they are in the minority. A common refrain heard is that "there's just too much new stuff coming out all the time, you can't learn everything", which is true, but it's often also an oft-employed excuse for not dedicating oneself to being current. So when most average tech folks hit 50, they have pretty much lost about 1-1.5 decades of high-rate tech learning.
  • gorbachev 8y ago
    In my current job I see a LOT of what I call cookie-cutter J2EE developers apply for our open positions from big Wall Street banks. I try to keep an open mind when interviewing these folks, and we even have some great employees with that background, but so very few of them surprise me positively. I sincerely hope they get rescued from their dead end jobs some how. It's such a shame. So much talent just getting wasted (IMHO).
  • fecak 8y ago
    Good points, but also keep in mind that if your employer is giving you a steady diet of interesting projects using technologies that are highly relevant, you don't have any need to go home and do personal projects at night. When I advise clients on career topics like this, I usually weigh whether the day job provides the client with a marketable skill set. If not, that person needs to consider doing things outside of work to maintain marketability. If the day job provides challenges and the proper set of tech, no real need to invest much additional time to learning.
• coss 8y ago
  It's weird at 30 I can't see myself making it another 20 years. I find programming draining and exhausting, but I still enjoy doing it :? I just don't think I'll just feel like I will have lost a lot of the fire when I'm that age.
  • convolvatron 8y ago
    good instinct. certainly the personal reward of getting something interesting running dims. and I find myself working considerably slower, and its quite a bit easier to get distracted. most importantly the kind of work that was available for me 20 years ago was just inherently more interesting than the kind of work I can find today. if you don't get 'retirement money' early on, I would highly recommend spinning up another vocation to spend your later years with. at the very least you're in a privileged position where, ageism and market conditions aside, you can always backfill with a little drudge work.
  • coss 8y ago
    edit: I feel like I will have lost a lot of the fire when I'm that age.
    • Latteland 8y ago
      Have to find new things to do and learn about to keep interest in your life and in your job. Eventually if you never been a manager then that might be an interesting job change. And then working on a different technology and then taking a different role yet again. All these things can keep your interest level up. Imagine if you just sat in a job and a desk and a giant cubicle farm and Shuffle papers and never did anything interesting but prepared TPS reports. We are a lot more fortunate as programmers in that we have a lot of different career opportunities.
• modbait 8y ago
  I believe the "old == stagnant" meme is largely a myth. It sounds right somehow, so it sticks with us. Over the course of a long career, though, I've seen this kind of stagnation distributed pretty evenly across people of different ages. The difference is that when we someone who's young and stagnant, we just chalk them up as green, or a business type, etc. But not "stagnant". We can't see their future, so we can't see that they're always going to be like that. If you weren't stagnant when you were young, you're not going to be stagnant when you're old.
  • antonvs 8y ago
    But an older stagnant person's skills tend to be much more out of date. Younger ones have the benefit that their skills are still likely to be relevant at a larger subset of the employer pool.
    • modbait 8y ago
      That's an interesting point, and may very well be true. It doesn't imply that there's a correlation between age and stagnation, though. Also, in my experience, stagnation can run in the other direction, temporally. I encounter many young people who won't even learn about, much less consider, using a tool like 'make', simply based on the assumption that newer seemingly similar tools must be better. Sometimes the old ways really are superior for the task at hand.
      • fecak 8y ago
        That's just it. It's really rare to find a 25 year old with a stagnant set of skills. I don't know if stagnation is the best word, but I also think there are other elements. Complacency in some cases, or getting too comfortable. Most of the successful tech people I know that are 50+ never overstayed their welcome at companies where they stopped learning, or they were always being recruited by other firms and moved around. Recruiters generally aren't knocking on doors of someone who has been at the same company for 20 years, and that's for a variety of reasons.