11 ms·
A new career in software development: advice for non-youngsters
- timoteostewart 4y agoIs Java unfashionable yet, I wonder.
- pubby 4y agoI figure Java has been unfashionable for 10+ years. The applet boom was a long time ago.
- agumonkey 4y agoI wonder if the accelerated pace of features will invert that trend.
- habibur 4y agoJava is unfashionable since when Ruby on Rails came out. Early 2000.
- ipaddr 4y agoRuby is more fashionable than Java web development. PHP is more fashionable than Ruby. Go is miles more fashionable than PHP. Python is more fashionable than GO. These change as Ruby was way more fashionable than PHP 10 years ago. Golang was way more fashionable over Python 2 years ago. PHP was more fashionable to Python 15 years ago. Java is still fashionable because of android development.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- UncleOxidant 4y agoHasn't Ruby been unfashionable for a while now?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- habibur 4y agoSuperseded by something else. No surprise there.
- ldayley 4y agoAre you asking if Java is unfashionable enough for it to be seen as a legacy niche- like COBOL or 4GL? Just because it’s out of fashion doesn’t mean isn’t crowded…
- allendoerfer 4y agoEvery enterprise uses Java and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Enterprises pay higher wages than smaller shops.
- Peach_blue 4y agoHow come most people say software devs are in demand and then there is this comment saying he receives 4000+ applications on a job and nobody in Europe should consider this career? Can perspectives on reality be this far apart, or is he trolling?
- bitexploder 4y agoThey almost always mean “talented/experienced” people are in demand. Not some random who did a bootcamp and watched a few YT videos and can barely copy and paste from stack overflow.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agoIssue is that many jobs are getting 100s of applicants, and even if you're "talented" you can easily still get lost in the system. That's without considering the related huge levels of gatekeeping now happening in hiring. Some experienced people are just too jaded to deal with it.
- bluGill 4y agoI is frustrating from our side too. My boss just sent me a half dozen resumes: they all look the same to me: someone fresh out of a CS degree looking for a job (this is an entry level position so that is what we want). I really don't want to interview 6 people for one position, so who do we call in?
- joebob42 4y agoThe "fair" and probably also reasonable imo thing to do is just pick randomly if you have a bunch of equally good people and can't interview them all. Or make them do leetcode stuff, I think this situation is basically what that whole part of the process is for.
- bin_bash 4y agoIf you actually are talented, and reasonably right for the role: figure out who the hiring manager is and message them on LinkedIn. You don't have to make sure it's the right HM, as long as you're close they'll point you in the right direction. I've done this many times (before working in big tech) and I have always received a response. There is only 1 company that I've failed to get through for at least some kind of a screen: MSFT. They seem to want nothing to do with me.
- stblack 4y agoMaintaining and extending legacy code is, in many ways, orthogonal to its underlying language. You can make a 2x2 matrix with "legacy code quality" on one axis, and "language percieved desireability" on the other axis. You can make truckloads of money, earn much respect, with nearly zero negative ageism, in at least one of those quadrants. "Building new" versus "maintaining existing" are different mindsets, and often a choice. For older people just getting started, "maintaining existing" is often the wiser first decision. From there, the particular mix of language and tech stack count, and often the more obscure the better. Find a good niche.
- fartcannon 4y agoDo you have any real world examples of this?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s_dev 4y agoCOBOL Devs probably earn more than React Devs.
- eatonphil 4y agoEvery time I've gone looking for COBOL jobs on job sites out of curiosity I always see them paying pretty poorly. On Glassdoor for Cobol [0] the standard range is $54k to $179k (presumably in NYC metro where I am) with a reported maximum of $306k. The standard range for React [1] is $49k to $257k with a reported maximum of $550k. I'm not saying Glassdoor is perfect but better to have these discussions based on some measured data than just common mantra that legacy is boring but pays better. [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-SRCH_KO0,16.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-S... [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/react-developer-salary-SRCH_KO0,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/react-developer-salary-SR...
- 4y ago
- lmc 4y agoThere aren't many jobs in Cobol or Fortran, and they tend to be powering things that aren't very junior-friendly. I would go for C#, Java, or (if you have a masochistic streak) C++. And SQL. Honestly Go seems to be over its honeymoon period and is probably a safe bet also (there's 500 Go vs 600 C# jobs on my regular UK job search site).
- usrbinbash 4y ago> Honestly Go seems to be over its honeymoon period and is probably a safe bet also This. Go is an established technology by now. Plus, it is really, really easy to learn and get productive in...I mean, being accessible even to beginners was one of the design goals of the language. One can literally get to grips with its basics over a long weekend.
- Animats 4y agoYes. I was comfortable in Go in about a week. It lets you do most of the things you really need to do in a web backend without too much bother. The language is generally well behaved. There's no framework-of-the-week problem. JavaScript/TypeScript/Node/React/etc is a treadmill.
- letitbeirie 4y agoThere are some great web frameworks out there (gin, mux, echo, etc) but one of Go's strengths is that it's just as easy to stand up a server without them.
- mjevans 4y agoI've done some personal projects in Go (golang?) and I respect it as a modern development language. Rust is on my TODO list to dabble in; at least at a glance the language has a solid conception, a clean syntax for portability, and the language syntax appears to lean towards clarifying much of the undefined behavior optimization other languages get humans into trouble over. I'd even take mono / C# over Java; but that's just because of the real world enterprise nightmares I've seen... all the fossilized versions of vulnerable libraries everywhere.
- starwind 4y agoTangential to this piece: if you're worried about ageism, consider going into to defense and aerospace. Lots of older developers because of the clearance requirement
- corrral 4y agoShit, they probably have trouble hiring & retaining people under 40, thanks to the clearance requirement. Big overlap between the millennial-and-younger tech crowd and folks who are fairly big fans of federally-illegal drugs. At least cannabis, if nothing else.
- mywittyname 4y agoNot in my experience. There's plenty of people under 40 in the defense industry. Every big defense contractor has internship programs to feed people in fresh out of university. And once you're in, it can be difficult to get out, since the pay is above average for the regions (and the benefits are glorious), but the workload is so light. It's not unusual to be on a project that's going nowhere for four months, so you get to come in and do busy work. Hiring is tough right now, but it's tough for everyone. But that has lead to a huge increase in wages. Every one of my friends in the industry has seen promotions and 40% pay raises.
- nonameiguess 4y agoIf you already have a clearance, sure. Otherwise, it's usually more ageist, at least ever since the OPM hack caused the SSBI process to span out so long. Since you go back the lesser of either 10 years or when a candidate turned 18, it pays to hire people younger than 28 since their investigations won't have to go back as far and can thus be completed faster.
- starwind 4y agoFor older workers it can actually be easier because people move a lot in their 20s. A worker in their 40s might only have to list 3 addresses where a kid 2 years out of college might have to list like 5--one for every dorm and their parents and their first apartment
- wilsonfiifi 4y agoColdfusion might be a good tech stack to learn. I'm sure there are a multitude of legacy apps/sites that still use it.
- stopnamingnuts 4y agoIf a new non-youngster developer wants to pursue the legacy app/niche language strategy described in the article then I tend to agree. ColdFusion is easy to learn but at the same time it's really just an abstraction layer for Java. If one finds they want to dip into the guts then that's certainly available. As you note, there's a respectable number of legacy apps, often in the US federal government sector. One still has to learn SQL, CSS, JS, etc.
- ozim 4y agoWell not only QA not only niche languages. If you get semi-technical there are loads of product owner/business analysts roles to fill in. Let alone if you just want any job there is first line support / second line support. There are plenty configuration roles which don't require knowledge of coding but ability to learn configuration settings, operating browser, operating software on different angle than just using it - but being able to congfigure it for others to use.
- jstx1 4y agoUmm, excuse me, what? The author is telling people to pick up Cobol/Basic/Pascal/MUMPS (and not Go or another modern language) as their first language in 2022? To make themselves more employable? How did this make it to the front page? I get that some people will like the old-man grumpiness in the post but put that aside and focus on the actual advice they're giving - it's just outright harmful career advice. And also, think about it from first principles - why would people starting their programming careers 15+ years later than most people need to pick different tools? It makes no sense at all.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> And also, think about it from first principles - why would people starting their programming careers 15+ years later than most people need to pick different tools? Because the people hiring people that are relatively inexperienced but not practicing undercover age discrimination tend to be very much not representative of the industry, or opportunities for new programmers, at large; people starting their career late need to specifically target that market segment, not the more general one. Note: I am not convinced of the specific advice, particularly in language focus, that the author here gives, but it is still less wrong than your suggestion that there is no difference between the optimum approaches for (by age) late- and early-entrants to programming.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- soneca 4y agoI agree with GP. The article's author is completely wrong IMO. If there is a difference in the approach of a twenty-something and a forty years old to start a software development career is not in the language choice. I think both should consider the same things regarding their choice. Namely: what they feel they like more and what has the most jobs. The difference is more likely to be in the interview skills. How they can make an effort to relate more with the interviewer (since they won't "naturally" connect through popular videogame tastes, memes, slangs, or whatever).
- 4y ago
- soneca 4y agoFrom my personal experience, I disagree completely with the advice that "non-youngsters" switching careers to software development should aim for "non-fashionable" tech. I started to learn software development at 37 years old (shoutout to freeCodeCamp.org!). That was in 2017. I went the frontend route, so I naturally started with html, css, and javascript. Then, since React was already the most popular framework then, I started to learn it and build projects solely on React. I skipped Jquery, pre-ES5 javascript, and things like that. I focused on what was fashionable. It turned out great for me! I am a very happy and successful (in financial terms compared to what I earned early or expected to earn these days) web developer. Funny enough, my first job was using Ember. But six months in, the company decided to migrate to React, since it was getting harder and harder to hire people that wanted to work with Ember. Then a couple of React jobs. And now I started a job using Vue. So still learning fashionable things. Btw, I never noticed ageism against me. I worked on a big Brazilian startup and then on three small American startups. Of course, plenty of the jobs that I applied for and didn't get could be because of ageism, I'll never know, but I consider myself to be successful in getting jobs, so at least I think it is not something that affected the general outcome of my career.
- armitron 4y agoStartups are not typically picky about hiring, in fact they have a major financial incentive to be anti-ageist. The problem is.. when the market tanks and startups go bust, it doesn't look so rosy anymore. Which is why the most coveted positions in this field are in a few corporations that pay top dollar. Getting hired there is a different story in terms of barrier to entry and competition you will face including ageism which is unfortunately very much present. So for someone non-young who looks at his future 10-20 years and tries to calculate risk, startups should not be taken into account. If one can't get a job at the top corps, one shouldn't enter the field. The risk is just too much.
- tragictrash 4y agoFirst off, I wouldn't work for "one of the top corps", being FAANG companies. The work life balance is terrible. Find a company that does it's own business and wants to hire their own developers. How do you expect to get into the field, not just graduating college with a CS degree? Your advice is like a self fulfilling prophecy. Go work at a startup. You'll learn tons. Sure, job security won't be as good as an established company, but the barrier to entry isn't either.
- sandworm101 4y ago>> new technology (fashion is about the new) often experiences a period of rapid change, and keeping up with change requires time and effort. Does somebody with a family, or outside interests, really want to spend time keeping up with constant change at work? I suspect no BS. I'm not one for terse responses but I cannot think of any better way to say it. This author evidently has never worked with anyone outside their graduating class. Without "outside interests" or "family" I predict they will burn out within five years.
- eatonphil 4y agoMy dad has a few decades experience with MUMPS and he has a hard time finding a job every time he's had to go looking. There are few jobs and they seem competitive. I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to learn it now for a job.
- germinalphrase 4y agoAnyone have (a link to) equivalent advice for transitioning into product management?
- ulisesrmzroche 4y agoIt's too crazy to be satire.
- wooly_bully 4y agoNot sure if I agree with some of the specifics of this, but the overall sentiment is still valuable. There's a lot of work out there for non-youngsters looking to get into software development. Lots of hiring companies will value your experience even if it's not directly related to coding. Wrote these just after I switch careers ~4 years ago: 1. https://zmsy.co/blog/career-switch/ https://zmsy.co/blog/career-switch/ 2. https://zmsy.co/blog/switching-careers-to-software-engineering-part-two/ https://zmsy.co/blog/switching-careers-to-software-engineeri...