7 ms·

This is not true. I'm 44, a principal engineer at $BigTechCo, and I know people in mid 50s that are very in demand and will remain gainfully employed as long a

This is not true. I'm 44, a principal engineer at $BigTechCo, and I know people in mid 50s that are very in demand and will remain gainfully employed as long as they want to. The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. This will serve you fine for a decade or two, but if you're in your mid 40s and you're only comfortable with technology from the late 90s, your job prospects will be limited. In order to have a long career in tech, you need to constantly be learning new technologies, frameworks, and languages. If you don't, you can coast for a while, but don't act all surprised at 50 when you get laid off and can't find any work. Would you honestly expect to be able to find work as a VAX/VMS engineer now if that was what you started working with right out of college and never learned UNIX, Linux, or Wintel?

drfuchs 8y ago
I take your point, but Unix does predate the Vax.
- illumin8 8y ago
  Agreed, but UNIX remains relevant, or at least easily transferrable to Linux, while Vax remains a niche platform.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    Vax Management System is predecessor of Windows: the New Technology (aka NT).
    - varjag 8y ago
      While that's conceptually true, there is little transferable skills between the two.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Nope, I'm near expert-level in Python3 and recent JS, with well-rounded platform and industry experience and it still took me a year to get hired last time. Didn't work so well for the guy in the article, did you read it? Ageism isn't the only problem though, just as big is that no one will allow you to learn on the job. With the explosion of tech stacks it should be a requirement, but the opposite is true. Tech interviews under the gun are another.
- illumin8 8y ago
  You also need to be honest about what your criteria is for a job search. Are you expecting to find a 6 figure job for a rockstar 10x Python/JS engineer in Podunk, Iowa? Come to any of a dozen cities that have a decent tech representation and you won't need a year to get an offer. And I'm not talking about SF or NY, you can go to places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, or Boise.
- neffy 8y ago
  Agreed. If you keep up to date (hey, who needs spare time). If you have marketable skills all over the stack. If you are persistent, then eventually you can find something. Possibly something really good if there's the right scarcity/odd set of skills only picked up with a lot of experience/we need this now opportunity. But then there's all the other times when they look at you as if you were a speaking monkey...
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    Everybody thinks its easy when the times are good.
seeker61 8y ago
There's no shortage of new frameworks to learn. To paraphrase Tony Soprano: "You could build a jetty with what's coming out."
CWuestefeld 8y ago
My first real job out of college was the end of the 80s, as a contractor at IBM. This was when they were really going down the tubes, and I saw them lay off literally my entire department except for me (my contract had already been paid for the whole year, so they still owned me). On one hand, I saw that IBM management was actually doing everything they could for those folks - I saw managers on the phones all day, trying to find jobs for their employees. But on the other hand, I saw all these people whose only skills were COBOL and RPG3, and even back then those technologies were obsolete. They'd been getting large salaries from IBM primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge, and when IBM stopped caring about those lines, the knowledge became worthless. Seeing what this did to people that I had been working with, and friendly with, really made a big impression on me. I promised I wouldn't let myself get into that same technical debt - but these day's that's easier said than done.
- walshemj 8y ago
  I saw this first hand at British Telecom due to restructuring we had some one who had only done COBOL since they had joined the GPO. They found Perl a challenge at first :-)
- knightofmars 8y ago
  > primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge This is a _HUGE_ loss to a company when a company loses someone with domain knowledge. Putting people into the "Are they good at skill X? Where X is the specific thing their title says they do." box and then hiring and firing based solely upon X is foolish to the extreme. If someone is mediocre at X but understands the business domain that they are working in they are worth the same as someone who is highly talented at X but doesn't know the domain. And while people can "learn the domain" most people don't actually want to. They'll learn it until they have passing knowledge but won't actually ever take the time to really understand it.
- jimmydddd 8y ago
  I was an intern at IBM in the EARLY 80s. At that time, people actually had the expectation of lifetime employment at IBM (as long as you were willing to relocate as needed). A project had just been cancelled when I arrived, and everyone in the department would come in every day and drink coffee and read the paper for 8 hours, waiting for the company to figure out how to re-deploy them. Not a care in the world about a lay off. In the end of the 80s when you showed up, the lay off must have been a huge shock.
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
True, to be relevant you need to stay up to date. One of the pains in staying up to date in tech is that learning Perl then java then javascript then python and whatever comes next and the corresponding frameworks seems like a big hamster wheel. You pretty much are doing the same thing you're just learning new ways to do it -not necessarily better. It seems like you're writing the same term paper over and over again. After a while, it loses its luster. If I could do it again I would choose a career where gaining knowledge adds to your mastery. In info. tech, it's a lateral move and you have to keep learning or you sink.
- stickfigure 8y ago
  Funny, I look at it very differently. After 25+ years as a professional polyglot... I feel like I can spin the hamster wheel with my pinkie. No, I haven't used that particular language/framework/whatever, but give me a week and I'll be as good as anyone on the team. There's not much new under the sun.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Same here, but that won't get you hired. Need to code under Swordfish conditions, have 5 years demonstrable experience in Framework_v2018, and hit the ground running!
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      Sure it will, at least at anyplace that could afford me. And hiring for specific framework knowledge is a big red flag anyway. I've also got 25+ years of contacts. I have to think that talented older developers who struggle with employment must have been antisocial in their careers. I cringed when the guy in TFA apparently threw a sandwich at a fast food worker - maybe there are some deeper personality issues at play besides just being old. It's no less sad, of course.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Personally, worked remote for a long time and it negatively affected my network before I realized it. In the 90s I could get a job within a month and networking wasn't as absolutely vital as now. Re the article, I suspect a baseline anger built up over being unemployed so long. That can lead to small injustices being blown out of proportion. Similar has happened to me in different areas over the years so can relate.
CalRobert 8y ago
From my early teens to my late 20's, I spent a lot of free time coding. JS/HTML/CSS then Perl then PHP then Python then Node (so back where I started in a weird sense). I didn't program professionally until I was thirty. But now I actually like to play with my kid and travel when I'm not at work, and it's painfully obvious when people say "hey try a bit of Rust or Go or whatever" they don't mean on work hours. This is a bit problematic, too, because I use Node all day long and I suspect it will not be a technology with a long future.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Hmm, don't know your work environment, but even at the most "fast paced" (ie poorly managed) places one can still squeeze a few hours a week to hack on a small research project. It's part of a software engineer's job to evaluate technologies and no one so far has chided me for doing so. Only the most cynically bad kind of manager would try, and some of those can be convinced otherwise when the utility explained.
EADGBE 8y ago
> The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. You hit the nail on the head here.

drfuchs 8y ago

I take your point, but Unix does predate the Vax.

illumin8 8y ago
Agreed, but UNIX remains relevant, or at least easily transferrable to Linux, while Vax remains a niche platform.
- anticensor 8y ago
  Vax Management System is predecessor of Windows: the New Technology (aka NT).
  - varjag 8y ago
    While that's conceptually true, there is little transferable skills between the two.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Nope, I'm near expert-level in Python3 and recent JS, with well-rounded platform and industry experience and it still took me a year to get hired last time. Didn't work so well for the guy in the article, did you read it? Ageism isn't the only problem though, just as big is that no one will allow you to learn on the job. With the explosion of tech stacks it should be a requirement, but the opposite is true. Tech interviews under the gun are another.

illumin8 8y ago
You also need to be honest about what your criteria is for a job search. Are you expecting to find a 6 figure job for a rockstar 10x Python/JS engineer in Podunk, Iowa? Come to any of a dozen cities that have a decent tech representation and you won't need a year to get an offer. And I'm not talking about SF or NY, you can go to places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, or Boise.
neffy 8y ago
Agreed. If you keep up to date (hey, who needs spare time). If you have marketable skills all over the stack. If you are persistent, then eventually you can find something. Possibly something really good if there's the right scarcity/odd set of skills only picked up with a lot of experience/we need this now opportunity. But then there's all the other times when they look at you as if you were a speaking monkey...
- dev_dull 8y ago
  Everybody thinks its easy when the times are good.

seeker61 8y ago

There's no shortage of new frameworks to learn. To paraphrase Tony Soprano: "You could build a jetty with what's coming out."

CWuestefeld 8y ago

My first real job out of college was the end of the 80s, as a contractor at IBM. This was when they were really going down the tubes, and I saw them lay off literally my entire department except for me (my contract had already been paid for the whole year, so they still owned me). On one hand, I saw that IBM management was actually doing everything they could for those folks - I saw managers on the phones all day, trying to find jobs for their employees. But on the other hand, I saw all these people whose only skills were COBOL and RPG3, and even back then those technologies were obsolete. They'd been getting large salaries from IBM primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge, and when IBM stopped caring about those lines, the knowledge became worthless. Seeing what this did to people that I had been working with, and friendly with, really made a big impression on me. I promised I wouldn't let myself get into that same technical debt - but these day's that's easier said than done.

walshemj 8y ago
I saw this first hand at British Telecom due to restructuring we had some one who had only done COBOL since they had joined the GPO. They found Perl a challenge at first :-)
knightofmars 8y ago
> primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge This is a _HUGE_ loss to a company when a company loses someone with domain knowledge. Putting people into the "Are they good at skill X? Where X is the specific thing their title says they do." box and then hiring and firing based solely upon X is foolish to the extreme. If someone is mediocre at X but understands the business domain that they are working in they are worth the same as someone who is highly talented at X but doesn't know the domain. And while people can "learn the domain" most people don't actually want to. They'll learn it until they have passing knowledge but won't actually ever take the time to really understand it.
jimmydddd 8y ago
I was an intern at IBM in the EARLY 80s. At that time, people actually had the expectation of lifetime employment at IBM (as long as you were willing to relocate as needed). A project had just been cancelled when I arrived, and everyone in the department would come in every day and drink coffee and read the paper for 8 hours, waiting for the company to figure out how to re-deploy them. Not a care in the world about a lay off. In the end of the 80s when you showed up, the lay off must have been a huge shock.

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

True, to be relevant you need to stay up to date. One of the pains in staying up to date in tech is that learning Perl then java then javascript then python and whatever comes next and the corresponding frameworks seems like a big hamster wheel. You pretty much are doing the same thing you're just learning new ways to do it -not necessarily better. It seems like you're writing the same term paper over and over again. After a while, it loses its luster. If I could do it again I would choose a career where gaining knowledge adds to your mastery. In info. tech, it's a lateral move and you have to keep learning or you sink.

stickfigure 8y ago
Funny, I look at it very differently. After 25+ years as a professional polyglot... I feel like I can spin the hamster wheel with my pinkie. No, I haven't used that particular language/framework/whatever, but give me a week and I'll be as good as anyone on the team. There's not much new under the sun.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Same here, but that won't get you hired. Need to code under Swordfish conditions, have 5 years demonstrable experience in Framework_v2018, and hit the ground running!
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    Sure it will, at least at anyplace that could afford me. And hiring for specific framework knowledge is a big red flag anyway. I've also got 25+ years of contacts. I have to think that talented older developers who struggle with employment must have been antisocial in their careers. I cringed when the guy in TFA apparently threw a sandwich at a fast food worker - maybe there are some deeper personality issues at play besides just being old. It's no less sad, of course.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Personally, worked remote for a long time and it negatively affected my network before I realized it. In the 90s I could get a job within a month and networking wasn't as absolutely vital as now. Re the article, I suspect a baseline anger built up over being unemployed so long. That can lead to small injustices being blown out of proportion. Similar has happened to me in different areas over the years so can relate.

CalRobert 8y ago

From my early teens to my late 20's, I spent a lot of free time coding. JS/HTML/CSS then Perl then PHP then Python then Node (so back where I started in a weird sense). I didn't program professionally until I was thirty. But now I actually like to play with my kid and travel when I'm not at work, and it's painfully obvious when people say "hey try a bit of Rust or Go or whatever" they don't mean on work hours. This is a bit problematic, too, because I use Node all day long and I suspect it will not be a technology with a long future.

mixmastamyk 8y ago
Hmm, don't know your work environment, but even at the most "fast paced" (ie poorly managed) places one can still squeeze a few hours a week to hack on a small research project. It's part of a software engineer's job to evaluate technologies and no one so far has chided me for doing so. Only the most cynically bad kind of manager would try, and some of those can be convinced otherwise when the utility explained.

EADGBE 8y ago

> The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. You hit the nail on the head here.