16 ms·

Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On

134 points by ojbyrne 15y ago

toadi 15y ago
Being 35 this news makes me a scared old man who maybe won't get hired again ;)
- marcc 15y ago
  Stay current with your skills and age won't matter.
  - ootachi 15y ago
    Wrong. Listen to all these stories. Everyone on this site will end up either unemployed and unable to find work if they don't win the startup lottery or die before reaching 40.
    - bstewartnyc 15y ago
      I'm a 42 year old software developer, and I stay current: SOLR, Hadoop, HBase, Storm, iOS, Clojure, HTML5, etc. Its harder to keep up now (primarily because of less time to study and play with tech) but I still love it. Also, keep studying business (entrepreneurship, startups) and never stop working on communication skills. I get paid well and get job offers all the them. Last but not least, take up running.
- dspillett 15y ago
  33 myself and it has crossed my mind. My guess based on what I've seen in my little bit of the world is that experience and skillset count more than age but you have to have both, hence I need to modernise my skillset in a few places sooner rather than later.
  - jerfelix 15y ago
    I look at it this way. How many years of REAL experience does a highly qualified 22 year old have? If they spent their college years EXTREMELY productively, then maybe 4 or 5. OK, you're 33. The upper limit of re-tooling time required, to be just as up-to-date on the latest technologies is 4-5 years. And all you need to do is be as productive as that 22 year old was during his college years! In reality. you could do it in 6 months of focused, unemployed time. Or a year of evening work, while you remain employed.
- tony_vivaldi 15y ago
  I was laid off a year ago at age 37 and have not been able to get a job since, or even get many interviews. I think at this point I've applied to 77 jobs, heard back from 11, and have actually been phone screened by 5. Most of my experience is in relatively "hot" technology at startups... I have three Rails sites I can point to and worked on an iPhone app with 3 million users, with a node.js and Redis backend. I have a github account. I've solved programming challenges from Facebook, interview street, spotify, etc. I don't think I'm a total slouch, and I've worked with guys FAR worse than I am. It's pretty painful to think about some of the duds that are still employed while I can't even get an interview. People prescribe keeping skills relevant, but focusing on latest technologies can be a mistake. If I had more experience with Microsoft tech or J2EE I could probably pick up a boring job doing enterprise stuff somewhere in the midwest. I thought I could always just pick up a job through my network, but a lot of guys my age who were friends at other companies are sort of checked out and are not in a position to hire. The younger guys I met I think just don't want to pull me in because they have plenty of younger friends they could hire first. A lot of tech hiring, especially at the startup level, is hiring guys that you want to be bros with. Generally, you aren't bros with guys 10 or 15 years older than you are. I never thought I'd be one of the guys in the articles like this, so I'm not sure exactly what to do. I've been working on iPhone apps in my spare time, but at some point I am going to run out of money. It can get very depressing and does quite a number on one's mental health. You feel like you can't socialize because you should be looking for work, and not spending money. Your extended family and friends kind of abandon you because they think something must be wrong with you (maybe there is?). This anxiety and isolation makes it pretty hard to focus and I've been considering trying anti-depressant medications, just so I can finish off my apps. However, I have diminished confidence at this point that having finished iPhone apps will get me any money, or another job. I often feel like I should just stop wasting my time and try to get some sort of dangerous but high paying labor job, like an oil roughneck. Or maybe just move to some cheap developing nation and become some sort of ex-pat weirdo guy? Another aspect of this, is that it seems kind of weird to even get a job stocking shelves at target, or something. Would they even hire me? Would it be worth it to make the 1400 a month? I now have a lot of sympathy for the "99%" type people. Those Seth Godin and Friedman pieces about the new economy being no place for average workers are pretty much correct. I wouldn't say I'm a C player but I'd say I'm around a B+. Unfortunately, B+ and 35 or above computer programmer doesn't seem to cut it. P.S. if anyone has any advice it would be pretty helpful to me and maybe others
devs1010 15y ago
From what this sounds like, its not their age its their skillset, they have a skillset that has become more and more obsolete and haven't adapted. At my current job there are guys well over 35 who used to work in jobs like what they are describing in the article (semiconducator companies, etc) but they have since adapted and developed new skills relating to web programming, I don't think the way they are portraying this is entirely accurate.
tom_b 15y ago
Fuck this. I think the real danger is being the 12-year master of TPF reports at BigCorp, Inc. How do you spin 20 years at BigCorp in an increasingly non-technical role over that time window in a way that would actually excite Google or Facebook? I think the norm for those of us who want to stay technically relevant is to be open to re-inventing our hacker skills, master the linking of our efforts to bottom-line results, and the wisdom to know when the time has come to tackle new tech stacks and projects.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- spitfire 15y ago
  Simple: Experience. With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. Also, math and analysis skills never go out of style. The fact is, the technology industry does not value experience it values novelty. Try asking a rails dev what a taylor series is sometime. I'll take the guy with deep experience and analytical skills and self awareness but just a little $cooltech exposure any day.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    Grey hairs don't correlate with wisdom. Most people don't actually grow and change all that much, they just get older.
  - steve-howard 15y ago
    How much programming requires you to know about Taylor series? I think they're nifty, but not very relevant to most work. I sort of agree with you that experience matters, but I'm not so sure math is useful unless you're writing programs for scientific computing or you want to be a professor.
    - moultano 15y ago
      That's self-fulfilling. Math lets you solve problems that you wouldn't even have though of as problems before. If you don't know the math, your brain skips over them as a fact of life rather than as something with a solution. Programming doesn't require math because programmers don't necessarily know math, not because the opportunity isn't there.
jakejake 15y ago
In this business, if you don't re-tool every few years you run a high risk of becoming obsolete during what should be your golden years because that is just about when whatever skills you learned in college may have totally phased out. It is very easy to feel that you're at the top of the game when you just come out of school and you're learning the latest bleeding-edge software development techniques. You may look at the old dudes like myself and think that we don't know what's going on. But unless you win the lottery or hit the jackpot then you have to keep re-tooling every 3-4 years. You cannot allow yourself to coast for very long. Just think about this - all of the time you've invested in learning whatever it is that you are doing now - you will have to re-do that same amount of effort every few years. It is sad because I think of all the hours I spend programming pascal text-based airline reservation systems. But alas those times are gone, I take from it what I can and move on. I've been in this for 20 years and it has consistently been about 3-4 years I have to totally re-learn some new skills in order to stay competitive. Even the past few months I've been in the trenches learning backbone.js, require.js, building html5 apps, mobile apps. This stuff didn't exist even 5 years ago, let alone when I came out of school! It's not a major problem for me because I love learning new stuff anyway, but I have seen other people drop out of the industry because they only started in it for the paycheck.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  It depends on what you do. If you are a low-level operating systems guy, it's C, C++, and VCS all the way down- perhaps with a few newer tools, like better debuggers, added to the mix slowly over the years.
  - jakejake 15y ago
    100% agree. I have noticed that too. The lower you go on the stack the more stable things seem to be. Writing javascript at the client browser level is just insane - it feels like a new must-know framework comes out every month!
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I am not so sure. I too develop in Javascript and it seems to me that most of the patterns used were carried over from the gang of four (with a few updates, since Javascript is nominally a functional programming language) which is well known in the Java community, but was originally written for C++ (or smalltalk). So sure something have to change, but retooling does not take nearly as long as it took to learn to program in the first place.
jfoutz 15y ago
Ah, the tech industry. 45 is old.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Raganwald turns fifty this year. That’s “grandpa old.” The trouble with being 40+ is that "I’m not young enough to know everything,” as Oscar Wilde quipped.
russell 15y ago
When I was 35 and quit my job to start a start-up, my mother told me not to to do that because I was too old to get another job. Three decades later I'm doing fine.
nhebb 15y ago
The key point is that Silicon Valley has changed from a hardware hub to a software hub. This isn't about programmers who haven't kept their skills relevant. It's more about hardware design engineers and manufacturing personnel whose jobs have left the area (and the country).
- shareme 15y ago
  What the article fails to mention is that there is a hiring boom for hardware designers in Texas.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
If you're unemployed (and wanting that situation to change) you need to pivot. If you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen up your coding skills, or you B.A. skills. If you've been coding something nobody uses anymore, time to switch areas. It bothers me that we treat unemployment as somehow a failure of the system. As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is evolving. All of us had better get our asses in gear and catch up. Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along. I am very sorry that our education system is completely out of whack with what we actually need. There area lot of folks with great credentials who are lining up to create "jobs" programs that will have very poor results. But if I'm an unemployed person, I can't help any of that. The only thing I can do is to take responsibility, keep busy, and start my personal marketing/sales machine. I said that in a pretty cranky fashion because there's another point that's missing in a lot of this discussion: I find as I get older my tolerance for bullshit decreases. The first time you work for a bad PM who is destroying the project you kind of buckle down, maybe struggle along, but generally put up with it. After all, you have nothing in your life experience to give you context. But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong -- nicely, of course -- than to spend six months on a death march. I find that these conversations require a level of trust that younger folks have difficulty giving older folks, and vice-versa. You either become too "grumpy" or you become so passive as to be not worth a damn. In many teams I have seen older workers tell the team that they have these worries that are being unaddressed. In each case, it was way too easy for the team to say "Old Jim is just a grumpy old guy, cranky and he has a bad attitude" than it was to meet Jim half-way and go forward. I think there is a real and measurable communication problem in technology teams between age groups. I'm not sure what the magic bullet is going to be. Or if there is one.
- coffee 15y ago
  > But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong Honestly, this is one of the main reason I see that a lot of hiring managers LOVE young, inexperienced, recent college grads. They do not want to be told they are wrong. They want these people to shut their mouths, buckle down, and just continue with the death march. Even if the end result is failure, which it typically is, it's way easier to fail in this manner than it is to work hard at succeeding...
benmathes 15y ago
Learn new tools every few years. Focus on learning tool-agnostic things like how to build abstractions, working well in a team, coding processes, run-time complexity, and tool-agnostic concepts like closures/monads/etc.
brador 15y ago
The key point with tech is age matters little. If you have the skills, you'll have no trouble getting work. Yes, ageism is a slight problem of course, as with every profession, but programming is more a meritocracy than most other professions. Keep the skills sharp and relevant and you'll have few worries.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I'm curious where your evidence that there is only a slight ageism problem in tech. I think it is more prevelant than you are implying. I agree that keeping skills sharp is important, but I have seen where older people are assumed to be behind the curve, regardless of the value of wisdom gained through experience; where younger people are assumed to be ahead of the curve, regardless of the lack of any real experience. The ageism is subtle, but, as such, it has an equally pernicious effect on hiring.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
pnathan 15y ago
After a while, people get into their groove and don't want to get out. If the groove became a dead end in hiring, then they are in trouble when they next look for work. It shows up with older people because as you get more experienced (ie, older), you have a better change of having found your groove. I think continual learning is the only way to avoid this problem. edit: Also, after you've seen a few crunches for no good reason, you just don't want to be all eager beaver and work overtime without having a sound reason up front. So I think that turns off employers as well... rather pay someone cheap who works overtime than the expensive guy who laughs at the hopeless schedule.
- mark_l_watson 15y ago
  I agree with you that continual learning is a requirement for managing a career or calling. I am now 60 and I still get a more than enough work offers but I find that I am spending a larger fraction of my time in learning activities than I used to. Twenty years ago I probably averaged 5 or 6 hours a week doing technical reading and coding experiments; now I easily spend 10 to 15 hours a week in learning activities. Part of this re-emphasis is because I enjoy learning new things and part is because this effort is required to keep getting interesting work that I enjoy. Also, as I get older, I have no interest at all in management or team leadership. I just want to design and write code. Another thing that is almost as important as continual learning is what I would call "ego management." Most of us with decades of experience have had some spectacular successes in our careers but these are simply not relevant now. Live in the moment. I think that it is important to appreciate how much young people bring to the game in terms of entrepreneurship, creativity and job skills. I have no problems reducing my rates (inflation adjusted) as I get older to be in alignment with my current market value. I have an old friend who is not willing to do this, keeps his rates at very high levels, and gets no work. I have stopped talking to him about how much fun I have working.
joeycfan 15y ago
This is so true. Sometimes I think they're trying to put together a hockey team. Good luck in getting on that Mr. 40 year old.
RandallBrown 15y ago
Of course you're not going to get a job writing assembly, if that's really all you can/are willing to do you probably aren't the type of person I'd want to hire, even if the job was to write assembly. I'm 24 and work with plenty of older guys. One of them always makes fun of us mac developers because he was writing mac software before we were born and OS X isn't a "real" mac. He doesn't sit around complaining about the good old days of assembly, he learns new things. His experience follows the tech industry pretty closely as it moved from assembly to c to c++, etc. Now he writes Android apps. The point is that older guys only become irrelevant by choice. Programming is an industry with almost no up front cost to get started on. Anyone with a computer can do it. Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why don't they brush up on their development skills and learn something new?
- a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
  "Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why don't they brush up on their development skills and learn something new?" If those specific unemployed people all went home and learned Android development, most of them still wouldn't be hired, anywhere, not in tech (because they're old and unemployed) and not in "survival" jobs (because they're old, and they'll leave when they find something better). They're garbage as far as the economy is concerned. That the practice of refusing to consider unemployed people for hiring is common enough to warrant discussion partially supports that.
  - RandallBrown 15y ago
    Just add the "freelancer" line to your resume and voila, you've no longer been unemployed for a few years. This also assumes that you've been doing something that could qualify as freelancing like working on some phone apps or a website or something. If you've been sitting on your ass for 2 years, yeah it's going to look pretty bad to employers.
    - wyclif 15y ago
      If they've been sitting on their ass. But when the economy tanked, a lot of people took the money they saved during the boom years and traveled the world. Or learned a new programming language. Or built something useful. So 2 year gaps in work history shouldn't be a deal killer. If they are, the system is truly, tragically broken.
pinaceae 15y ago
funny how a lot of techies here say, just re-learn every few years and you'll have no problems as you get older. bullshit. nobody hires a 55 year old javascript coder. i mean, just look at the usual suspects here on hackernews. look around you. and this is not about skills. but about money, plain and simple. if you've been working for 25 years, your salary demands have risen. at least that is what everyone assumes. so congrats on submitting your resume, but you'll get filtered out right away cause younger people are cheaper, with the same skill set. but isn't there added value in the wisdom that age brings? sure. but where is this a criterium? does a job posting for an experienced java coder mean that you should have been in the industry for at least 15 years? of course not. if you're reaching 50 in technology, you need to find an exit scenario. government, management, teaching.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
  "if you're reaching 50 in technology, you need to find an exit scenario. government, management, teaching." Everyone's goal should be financial independence by 35, or as soon thereafter as you are able to accomplish.
  - scotth 15y ago
    What do you mean by financial independence?
    - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
      That you could not work another day and still survive in our economy with reasonable comfort and safety. In an industry like this, that focuses on the new, this will become critical for everyone at some point, although the point where it becomes critical will vary for each person. Hopefully everyone will be employable and viable as long as they want, but shit happens.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        Good heavens. You need a good 1.5-2mil in capitol if we assume modest 3% returns on your money, if you want to live at $40k/year. How can everyone stockpile 1.5-2mil by the time they are 35? More importantly, what will happen to our economy if everyone stops working at 35?
ahoyhere 15y ago
Part of it is the older workers in question have outdated skills and probably act like "fuddy-duddies." I've worked with great tech types in their 40s plus, who are smart and present and current as well as wise and experienced… and I've worked with terrible ones who bellow like angry walruses (AGRGRAGRAH) and declare things to be done which are impossible. Including one who fell asleep in a meeting with our mutual client, snoring with his subnotebook on his belly, then woke up long enough to demand I make it so the web site "copied the data to the email in a table" when somebody dragged a "picture" from "The browser to email". After back and forths of me explaining that it couldn't be done, he eventually demanded, "WHY NOT?" and I, exasperated and having exhausted all my other explanations, said, "Because the internet doesn't work that way." And yet, one of us got hired as CTO and the other got fired from the project. (Hint: the young person got fired.) I think that in this, as with all questions of skill and desirability, the answer probably lies more in the worker themselves than the outside environment. That said, many of these companies want green young people because they will work for peanuts, can be manipulated, and don't know any better. Older workers tend to have a better sense of self, perspective, the need for work-life balance (because they have families, etc) and are less likely to sleep under their desk. This is the money line: "Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities." So is this: 'Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook, said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.”' This is code for: you have some skillz but no actual prospects (or you wouldn't want to work for us), so we'll label you "entrepreneurial" so you feel good about coming and working for the man right out of college, and we'll squeeze & overwork you as long as you don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way.
temphn 15y ago
Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of college. This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack didn't change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for more. No doubt there are many who'll argue with these facts. The last time this came up, a guy piped up saying that he'd hire a smart old programmer any day over a dumb young'un who knew node or Rails. That guy was advertising for a Rails dev in his profile. The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or company powered by older engineers. Note that discriminating against Jewish, Persian, Chinese, Korean, or Indian programmers would obviously lose you money, as those groups constitute a substantial fraction of the tech workforce. It is not so obvious that the market is economically irrational about the abilities of other groups. (Also: note how the article and the engineers all want to work at the best companies, and turn their noses up at the non-Facebooks and non-Googles they might need to "settle" for. What if employees couldn't freely discriminate regarding where they want to work? Does anyone stop to think that the companies they want to join so badly might know a thing or two about what kinds of people make good programmers?)
- amcintyre 15y ago
  Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of college. Nice generalization. Personally, over the last few years I've run into lots of "kids fresh out of college" that can't/won't work to learn skills they need to do their job. Game devs that don't know the math behind changing coordinate systems, and consequently write fragile rendering/UI code. Testers that won't write unit tests, and devs that won't write and/or run them to avoid creating new bugs. Early-career C++ coders that will argue to you that the OS won't let two threads touch a static variable at the same time. But I don't generalize that into assuming every young person is a lazy moron. I've also met some bright young people that will work hard to learn new theory/skills/languages/frameworks, and care about doing a good job. So I prefer to evaluate each person on their own merits, and that seems to work out a lot better. YMMV. If a company isn't interested in hiring me because they're afraid I have enough experience to know better than to work 80-hour weeks and take my work home for 50-75% of industry pay while making them rich, that's ok with me. I've got that T-shirt, and I don't want another one. This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack didn't change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for more. If simply learning the top of the latest tech stack every few years is making you a lot of money right now, you'd better start saving. I'm thinking something like this: http://www.despair.com/motivation.html http://www.despair.com/motivation.html The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or company powered by older engineers. Most people that are so inclined would rather start the company and power it with younger, more fungible people that don't know their own value. ;) Seriously, though, aren't most startup founders 40+ already?
jedberg 15y ago
This happened to my Dad. At 61, he has a long resume of experience, but it is experience in a lot of old technologies. He finally solved the problem though, by moving out of state. Last month, my Dad, a native a Los Angeles who has lived there his entire life, moved to Iowa. He basically had to find a company that was still running on old technology that actually respected experience.
- mathattack 15y ago
  Speaking from experience, they don't pay as well in Iowa as the coasts, but it is possible to find a job if you'll move to where they are. To generalize about the midwest, you have a lot of people who still spend their life at one company, and do respect the simpler work histories.
  - jedberg 15y ago
    They don't pay as well in Iowa, but then again, the cost of living is a lot less.
    - mathattack 15y ago
      Indeed - it's a big tradeoff. It's probably 1/2 the cost of either coast, and you can send your kids to public schools without worrying about them getting mugged. But it speaks to the culture when cities brag about being, "Just 4 hours from Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha and St. Louis" A definite trade-off.
- lrobb 15y ago
  Curious... What tech is it?
  - jedberg 15y ago
    JD Edwards and a bunch of other stuff I don't even know the name of. :)
spudlyo 15y ago
“Especially in social media, cloud computing and mobile apps, if you’re over 40 you’re perceived to be over the hill,” Ms. Stadelman said. Just as a counterpoint, I recently joined the ranks of a large social media company and was surprised to discover that 3/6 of the folks on the database engineering team (mysqlf included) are over 40, and all but one person is over 30.
- pradocchia 15y ago
  Database engineering is serious business, and pretty staid, NoSQL notwithstanding.
  - wavetossed 15y ago
    NoSQL is also pretty serious business because what you are doing is deconstructing the relational database and assembling the bits that do the job that you need. A lot of NoSQL tools are marketed as doing far more than they really are capable of and you need real skills and knowledge of database internals to be able to navigate this treacherous area. That's why you see so many blogs about companies changing core NoSQL technologies.
B0Z 15y ago
This is just the way it is. Deal with it! Get in the game or GTFO the field. Sure, having the fire in your belly can mitigate much if not most of the "crochety" factor as can staying on the bleeding edge of coding and problem solving. But... if <insert random industry> didn't do this, if the biggest worry was keeping the old farts employed and coddling their irrelevance, <insert random industry> would NEVER progress. The US would be last in the world for meaningful product or service disruptions that every other country strives for. Again, at 42 with 16 years in technology, I'm one of the old farts. Skills that once got me the coveted double eyebrow raise and an extra digit on my bonus check, now get me the loathed single eyebrow raise and a comfy slot on the next RIF list. The union between a company and its employee base can be compared to a youthful first marriage between 20-somethings. Almost as soon as you say "I do", subconsciously, your will and desire to improve, to change, to grow starts to decline. You get fat. Your spouse gets fat. You gradually stop going out with friends or trying new things. Squirt out a couple of pups and you can pretty much write the excuses for why you can't do "this" or "that" in stone. The world is dynamic and the Indians, the Chinese, the South Americans, the Koreans, the Russians, pick your own example -- all of them -- understand this as a simple fact of life. From the moment they wake in the morning to the second their head hits the dirt floor at night, they are mentally and emotionally pounded with the relentless concept that they are NOT in first place. They are NOT the leader. They have miles and miles and miles to go before they can even begin to break into the same stratosphere of "advancement" that Westernized nations have taken for granted for the last 100 years. We provide for them a marker. A goal. A far-off, seemingly impossible to reach objective of what is possible when you push yourselves to limits you never knew you were capable of conquering. So, no. I don't feel sorry for the elder statesmen of <insert random industry>, and I'm even one of them. The very second I see my career plight as someone else's fault or the responsibility of something I can't control, I have already lost. I might as well close up shop and get my blue Wal-Mart vest on. Start practicing "would you like fry's with that". No. My position in technology is my responsibility. My relevance in comparison with you wiry fuckers 25 years my junior is 120% totally and without question not only my own responsibility, but my own choice. The truth is, if given even moderately comparable skills to you young lads on an interview, I have a leg up. I can run circles around the kids who still rent apartments and are still making payments on their first car. I have the benefit of patience that you only get from trying to do the same thing over and over 1000 times. I am more forward thinking, maybe not in terms of what the next Google is going to be, but in terms of execution, I can see things down the road that the whippersnappers can't see -- because they're not old enough to have seen the writing on the wall before. No. I am old (in Internet years), but I am not a victim. And when industry moves forward without me, the blame lies on me and MY decision to keep up. You young kids do have your uses though. You keep me and my ilk on our toes and are anything but shy about how fast and nimble I have to be to keep up.
tlogan 15y ago
In early 2000s, Silicon Valley was changed from a hardware hub (HP, IBM, etc.) to a software hub (Oracle, Informatica, Google, etc.). And now it is changing from software hub to "social networking" + "new business models" hub which unfortunately do not require hard core engineering skills. For example web design skills are very much in demand. I'm in 40s, and I wanted to move from my corporate job to something like start up I found out that majority of jobs in new startups are to get young people (so called talents) to work on simple applications for under-market wage (wages which are ok if you don't have any dependents) with benefits and "culture" intentionally set up to attract only young people.
SethMurphy 15y ago
It's simple: build something relevant or at least interesting. If you can do this you probably don't need a job. The bottom line is tech is for people obsessed with learning and creating. For many people, with age those obsession wear thin as the hair on their head.
CCs 15y ago
The age has nothing to do with it. It is all about accomplishments. Some people would have no problem getting hired. Think of Peter Norvig (56), Larry Wall (57), Guido van Rossum (55), Linus Torvalds (42). And you don't have to be this famous. Ex. publish a good iPhone app on GitHub, offers will start to flow in.
- ootachi 15y ago
  None of those people are employable, except as vanity hires at companies like Google. Think about it -- why would it be in a company's best interests to hire Linus Torvalds? They can get the kernel for free.
  - greenyoda 15y ago
    They'd be interested in hiring Linus because he's a very smart and resourceful guy who can communicate well and knows a lot about hardware and software and how to manage a large development project.
  - CCs 15y ago
    When I create a new architecture / design I would love to be able to chat even 10 min with a "vanity hire". Advice, 2nd opinion or just a different perspective - it saves you from months of dead ends...
lcargill99 15y ago
Lastday, Capricorn 29's. Year of the City: 2274. Carousel begins...
LVB 15y ago
At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to (and do) maintain my skills, and really don't see myself morphing into the old fuddy-duddy (completely not my nature, and even my youngest colleagues agree). That said, there are some significant life-style challenges that work against simply keeping one's skills sharp. Out of college I wanted to change the world, had all to gain and nothing to lose, just moved and had no family obligations, was surrounded by likewise eager entrepreneurs who were plugged into technology, and I could spend all day and night burrowing into whatever the latest thing was. In short, I could easily commit the vast amount of my time to tech and was naturally on top of things. Not so today! Wife, kids, and a mortgage means drastically reduced time for such endeavors, and a much greater responsibility to provide a stable income (hopefully with benefits too). Add to that, I'm not hanging out in bars after work surrounded by other sources of tech insight, which was always a great way to learn of new things and get a feel for where things are heading. Instead, I'm heading home, because there are a lot of non-tech things to take care of. This doesn't mean I throw in the towel. I carve out time where I can and work my ass off to stay abreast of changing technology, including working on side projects for more real-world practice. I burn some of my much-valued vacation time to get to a conference each year. And I'm cool with the way things are going. But I'm also realistic... Am I going to be burning whole weekends in 48 hour hackathons? Not likely, and least in my situation. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't emulate the behavior of an early 20's developer in Silicon Valley. But I can do things that I think keep me reasonably useful to employers. Most important: this is not at all due to age, but rather due to life circumstances that often come with getting older. When I'm 45 or 50, I will not be the genius who is cranking out the next Node.js in a weekend, but I highly doubt I'll be sitting at city hall waiting for f*cking Promatch to find me a job either.
- velshin 15y ago
  Well said.
hexis 15y ago
You can always interpret bad hiring practices as damage and route around them. My wife and I run our own tech business and I don't think any of our customers ever has or ever will care how old we are.
dkrich 15y ago
I would be very careful about applying generalizations here. This article is very vague about what constitutes an "advanced degree in engineering" and exactly what "a decade of experience in the technology sector" means. Not all employees are created equal and this type of study smacks of a certain statistical bias- ie, only the least qualified workers (those lacking the desired skillsets and experience, preferred degrees, etc.) will be the one's out of work. Therefore, to take those who are struggling to find work and project that onto the industry as a whole is to take a fairly protracted view of a complex situation. I'm not saying that the author's proposed explanation is impossible, just that it is only one of many plausible explanations, and without more information it would be a mistake to take any firm conclusions from this.
- greenyoda 15y ago
  The other obvious statistical bias is that the article is only covering Silicon Valley, which is hardly the entire tech industry.
jasonkester 15y ago
There are two basic flavors of "old guy" in tech. We've all worked with the ex-mainframe guy who still thinks at a punchcard pace and never really wrapped his head around all this web stuff. He liked his old, stable job at Epson because they had good benefits and a pension plan, but then the economy took a downturn and now he's on your team. Many of us have worked with the other type too, with 40 years of kicking ass under his belt, who can code you under the table in javascript and ruby as easily as he can in C (or FORTRAN if he feels like messing with you). As you make your way through this world, you get to choose which of those types you'd like to become. If you don't want the New York Times to write sympathy articles about you, I'd suggest going with the latter route.
- kabdib 15y ago
  I work with a developer who is 70. He kicks butt. It's amazing. My father in law retired at 75, a C coder doing embedded systems for the chip industry. He didn't kick people around, but was respected and was getting stuff done. I'm 50. I'd be happy to be either of those two people. I have little sympathy for the people who say to themselves that they can stuff the career growth at 40 because they're doomed. Screw that, I have role models. One thing that seems to help is: Be on a mission. Be on a fucking mission from God, take charge of design AND do all the little crap. Build system maintenance and code cleanup, who does that? Hint: It's not scutwork to make sure that things are working well, all throughout a project.
seclorum 15y ago
I'm 42 and have managed to survive 25 years professionally in the computer world, primarily as a software developer. There is one, hard, fast rule for survival as a developer, and it has worked very well for me for years. I will share it with you: Follow the platform. Programming is all about the hardware. How does it work? Its simple - programming on Windows for x86? Get yourself a Mac and learn to hack on it in your spare time (by the way: no television or other sedentary 'entertainment' activities - entertain yourself by learning new things). Already a Mac code - get an iPhone, or learn Android. An iOS developer already? Android master already? Alright then, time to get a Beagleboard and do some Linux hacking. Already hacked on Linux? Get into CUDA. CUDA genius already - okay, how about some of that Cloud tech .. There is no safety in platform mastery, because those platforms are like slippery barrels, spinning around and around, slowly sinking into redundancy. If you are employed for one platform, entertain yourself with learning to master another, newer or more interesting one. This works, over and over.
seclorum 15y ago
I'm 42 and have managed to survive 25 years professionally in the computer world, primarily as a software developer. There is one, hard, fast rule for survival as a developer, and it has worked very well for me for years. I will share it with you: Follow the platform. Programming is all about the hardware. How does it work? Its simple - programming on Windows for x86? Get yourself a Mac and learn to hack on it in your spare time (by the way: no television or other sedentary 'entertainment' activities - entertain yourself by learning new things). Already a Mac code - get an iPhone, or learn Android. An iOS developer already? Android master already? Alright then, time to get a Beagleboard and do some Linux hacking. Already hacked on Linux? Get into CUDA. CUDA genius already - okay, how about some of that Cloud tech .. There is no safety in platform mastery, because those platforms are like slippery barrels, spinning around and around, slowly sinking into redundancy. If you are employed for one platform, entertain yourself with learning to master another, newer or more interesting one. This works, over and over.
lrobb 15y ago
Related: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-da...
mahyarm 15y ago
The place I work at has a majority of 30 somethings and 40 somethings. We do C++/C & various mobile platforms.
wavephorm 15y ago
I bet there's a pile of 20 year olds with some jQuery and Rails under their belt, consider themselves a ninja rockstar, and this scenario won't happen to them cause jQuery rocks, and rails will be around forever and ever... Guess what... you'll all be out of work in 10 years unless you work your ass off to keep up. The computing world is changing faster than I ever remember. We are entering a new computing paradigm faster than most people will be able to upgrade their skills. If you aren't hacking your iPad, and you don't build mobile apps, have no NLP or machine learning experience, and you aren't hacking away at Kinect in your spare time, then your livelihood is gravely in danger. Welcome to the game.
lrobb 15y ago
I can never resist... From a recruiter I know: "A doctor, a lawyer and an Accountant with 30 years experience is probably a semi-reitred millionaire. A software engineer with 30 years experience is probably out of work." Or doing an hourly contract to keep some money coming in.
theDaveB 15y ago
Am 42 and went into software development at 15. I didn't really finish school and managed to land a job as a trainee programmer (told the company I was basically finished at school but had to back for my exams, I never did). I never really learnt new skills much after VB 6 (missed the whole .net thing), I got sick of having to learn new stuff every few years. I was a MCSD but that was nothing, read a book, sit a exam. I left IT and took up photography for a few years, tried to get back in and have never had a interview. I am now doing the odd website for friends and trying to make my first iPad App. Dave
brianm 15y ago
Frankly, if there are a lot of older folks (40 is older? I am in deep, deep trouble) with lots of experience having trouble finding jobs, then this is a ripe market to recruit from. Of course, I have a funny perspective -- I work with a guy who wrote compilers for Symbolics, and another who started programming before I was born (and I am in the supposedly-being-age-discriminated-against category). Between the two of them, and two more folks my own tender middle-age, they are the most productive, awesome folks I know and hope to keep working with for a long time to come. Seriously, if this is reality then start recruiting "old folks" -- you now have an unfair advantage in terms of recruiting.
o2sd 15y ago
"An Industry Moves On." LOL. Here's a little secret from a 43yo programmer making the best $$$ of his career. MOST SOFTWARE IS NOT BUILT BY SOFTWARE COMPANIES. Sure, everyone knows about Google, and Facebook, and for my fellow genXers, Microsoft. The truth is though, the code that gets written at those companies and other software companies like them is a tiny fraction of the all code that gets written. All over the economy, companies that are NOT software companies are writing code to DO STUFF. Sure Facebook is highly visible, 'valued at 100 BEEELLLIION dollars', and what all the cool kids are into. But really, who gives a shit about a feed of photos and asinine updates. Yes, it's like soap operas. Always popular, always mildly profitable, and if it disappeared tomorrow, the economy wouldn't notice. Real companies, on the other hand, need to build software to improve their business. Your productivity at those companies will depend on you getting some 'Domain Knowledge'. Yes, I know it's like getting your hands dirty, but if you want to prosper in software development as you get older, then you will need to add domain knowledge to your skill set. Ah! But which domains? Pick the hardest ones, is my advice. Ten years ago I would have said Financial Markets, but we are coming to the end of that gravy train. Financial Markets is a hard domain. It's difficulty makes it very difficult to find programmers who understand the domain enough to be productive, hence programmers who do have that knowledge are in very high demand. And no, they don't give a shit about how old you are. In the future, I think the fields of bio-informatics, robotic control, logistics, traffic control (and other N-P hard problems) will present great opportunities for older programmers to find niche domains to excel at and add longevity to your programming career. If you are young and you want to try your hand at a startup, do it now. If it works out, more power to you. If not, and you want to build a long career in software development, then find difficult and complex domains/industries and learn about them, because even if they don't build software now, they will in the future, and for that they are going to need programmers who understand the domain, not domain experts that can hack together some code.

134 points by ojbyrne 15y ago

toadi 15y ago

Being 35 this news makes me a scared old man who maybe won't get hired again ;)

marcc 15y ago
Stay current with your skills and age won't matter.
- ootachi 15y ago
  Wrong. Listen to all these stories. Everyone on this site will end up either unemployed and unable to find work if they don't win the startup lottery or die before reaching 40.
  - bstewartnyc 15y ago
    I'm a 42 year old software developer, and I stay current: SOLR, Hadoop, HBase, Storm, iOS, Clojure, HTML5, etc. Its harder to keep up now (primarily because of less time to study and play with tech) but I still love it. Also, keep studying business (entrepreneurship, startups) and never stop working on communication skills. I get paid well and get job offers all the them. Last but not least, take up running.
dspillett 15y ago
33 myself and it has crossed my mind. My guess based on what I've seen in my little bit of the world is that experience and skillset count more than age but you have to have both, hence I need to modernise my skillset in a few places sooner rather than later.
- jerfelix 15y ago
  I look at it this way. How many years of REAL experience does a highly qualified 22 year old have? If they spent their college years EXTREMELY productively, then maybe 4 or 5. OK, you're 33. The upper limit of re-tooling time required, to be just as up-to-date on the latest technologies is 4-5 years. And all you need to do is be as productive as that 22 year old was during his college years! In reality. you could do it in 6 months of focused, unemployed time. Or a year of evening work, while you remain employed.
tony_vivaldi 15y ago
I was laid off a year ago at age 37 and have not been able to get a job since, or even get many interviews. I think at this point I've applied to 77 jobs, heard back from 11, and have actually been phone screened by 5. Most of my experience is in relatively "hot" technology at startups... I have three Rails sites I can point to and worked on an iPhone app with 3 million users, with a node.js and Redis backend. I have a github account. I've solved programming challenges from Facebook, interview street, spotify, etc. I don't think I'm a total slouch, and I've worked with guys FAR worse than I am. It's pretty painful to think about some of the duds that are still employed while I can't even get an interview. People prescribe keeping skills relevant, but focusing on latest technologies can be a mistake. If I had more experience with Microsoft tech or J2EE I could probably pick up a boring job doing enterprise stuff somewhere in the midwest. I thought I could always just pick up a job through my network, but a lot of guys my age who were friends at other companies are sort of checked out and are not in a position to hire. The younger guys I met I think just don't want to pull me in because they have plenty of younger friends they could hire first. A lot of tech hiring, especially at the startup level, is hiring guys that you want to be bros with. Generally, you aren't bros with guys 10 or 15 years older than you are. I never thought I'd be one of the guys in the articles like this, so I'm not sure exactly what to do. I've been working on iPhone apps in my spare time, but at some point I am going to run out of money. It can get very depressing and does quite a number on one's mental health. You feel like you can't socialize because you should be looking for work, and not spending money. Your extended family and friends kind of abandon you because they think something must be wrong with you (maybe there is?). This anxiety and isolation makes it pretty hard to focus and I've been considering trying anti-depressant medications, just so I can finish off my apps. However, I have diminished confidence at this point that having finished iPhone apps will get me any money, or another job. I often feel like I should just stop wasting my time and try to get some sort of dangerous but high paying labor job, like an oil roughneck. Or maybe just move to some cheap developing nation and become some sort of ex-pat weirdo guy? Another aspect of this, is that it seems kind of weird to even get a job stocking shelves at target, or something. Would they even hire me? Would it be worth it to make the 1400 a month? I now have a lot of sympathy for the "99%" type people. Those Seth Godin and Friedman pieces about the new economy being no place for average workers are pretty much correct. I wouldn't say I'm a C player but I'd say I'm around a B+. Unfortunately, B+ and 35 or above computer programmer doesn't seem to cut it. P.S. if anyone has any advice it would be pretty helpful to me and maybe others

devs1010 15y ago

From what this sounds like, its not their age its their skillset, they have a skillset that has become more and more obsolete and haven't adapted. At my current job there are guys well over 35 who used to work in jobs like what they are describing in the article (semiconducator companies, etc) but they have since adapted and developed new skills relating to web programming, I don't think the way they are portraying this is entirely accurate.

tom_b 15y ago

Fuck this. I think the real danger is being the 12-year master of TPF reports at BigCorp, Inc. How do you spin 20 years at BigCorp in an increasingly non-technical role over that time window in a way that would actually excite Google or Facebook? I think the norm for those of us who want to stay technically relevant is to be open to re-inventing our hacker skills, master the linking of our efforts to bottom-line results, and the wisdom to know when the time has come to tackle new tech stacks and projects.

deleted 15y ago
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spitfire 15y ago
Simple: Experience. With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially. Also, math and analysis skills never go out of style. The fact is, the technology industry does not value experience it values novelty. Try asking a rails dev what a taylor series is sometime. I'll take the guy with deep experience and analytical skills and self awareness but just a little $cooltech exposure any day.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  Grey hairs don't correlate with wisdom. Most people don't actually grow and change all that much, they just get older.
- steve-howard 15y ago
  How much programming requires you to know about Taylor series? I think they're nifty, but not very relevant to most work. I sort of agree with you that experience matters, but I'm not so sure math is useful unless you're writing programs for scientific computing or you want to be a professor.
  - moultano 15y ago
    That's self-fulfilling. Math lets you solve problems that you wouldn't even have though of as problems before. If you don't know the math, your brain skips over them as a fact of life rather than as something with a solution. Programming doesn't require math because programmers don't necessarily know math, not because the opportunity isn't there.

jakejake 15y ago

In this business, if you don't re-tool every few years you run a high risk of becoming obsolete during what should be your golden years because that is just about when whatever skills you learned in college may have totally phased out. It is very easy to feel that you're at the top of the game when you just come out of school and you're learning the latest bleeding-edge software development techniques. You may look at the old dudes like myself and think that we don't know what's going on. But unless you win the lottery or hit the jackpot then you have to keep re-tooling every 3-4 years. You cannot allow yourself to coast for very long. Just think about this - all of the time you've invested in learning whatever it is that you are doing now - you will have to re-do that same amount of effort every few years. It is sad because I think of all the hours I spend programming pascal text-based airline reservation systems. But alas those times are gone, I take from it what I can and move on. I've been in this for 20 years and it has consistently been about 3-4 years I have to totally re-learn some new skills in order to stay competitive. Even the past few months I've been in the trenches learning backbone.js, require.js, building html5 apps, mobile apps. This stuff didn't exist even 5 years ago, let alone when I came out of school! It's not a major problem for me because I love learning new stuff anyway, but I have seen other people drop out of the industry because they only started in it for the paycheck.

sliverstorm 15y ago
It depends on what you do. If you are a low-level operating systems guy, it's C, C++, and VCS all the way down- perhaps with a few newer tools, like better debuggers, added to the mix slowly over the years.
- jakejake 15y ago
  100% agree. I have noticed that too. The lower you go on the stack the more stable things seem to be. Writing javascript at the client browser level is just insane - it feels like a new must-know framework comes out every month!
tomjen3 15y ago
I am not so sure. I too develop in Javascript and it seems to me that most of the patterns used were carried over from the gang of four (with a few updates, since Javascript is nominally a functional programming language) which is well known in the Java community, but was originally written for C++ (or smalltalk). So sure something have to change, but retooling does not take nearly as long as it took to learn to program in the first place.

jfoutz 15y ago

Ah, the tech industry. 45 is old.

raganwald 15y ago
Raganwald turns fifty this year. That’s “grandpa old.” The trouble with being 40+ is that "I’m not young enough to know everything,” as Oscar Wilde quipped.

russell 15y ago

When I was 35 and quit my job to start a start-up, my mother told me not to to do that because I was too old to get another job. Three decades later I'm doing fine.

nhebb 15y ago

The key point is that Silicon Valley has changed from a hardware hub to a software hub. This isn't about programmers who haven't kept their skills relevant. It's more about hardware design engineers and manufacturing personnel whose jobs have left the area (and the country).

shareme 15y ago
What the article fails to mention is that there is a hiring boom for hardware designers in Texas.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

If you're unemployed (and wanting that situation to change) you need to pivot. If you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen up your coding skills, or you B.A. skills. If you've been coding something nobody uses anymore, time to switch areas. It bothers me that we treat unemployment as somehow a failure of the system. As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is evolving. All of us had better get our asses in gear and catch up. Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along. I am very sorry that our education system is completely out of whack with what we actually need. There area lot of folks with great credentials who are lining up to create "jobs" programs that will have very poor results. But if I'm an unemployed person, I can't help any of that. The only thing I can do is to take responsibility, keep busy, and start my personal marketing/sales machine. I said that in a pretty cranky fashion because there's another point that's missing in a lot of this discussion: I find as I get older my tolerance for bullshit decreases. The first time you work for a bad PM who is destroying the project you kind of buckle down, maybe struggle along, but generally put up with it. After all, you have nothing in your life experience to give you context. But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong -- nicely, of course -- than to spend six months on a death march. I find that these conversations require a level of trust that younger folks have difficulty giving older folks, and vice-versa. You either become too "grumpy" or you become so passive as to be not worth a damn. In many teams I have seen older workers tell the team that they have these worries that are being unaddressed. In each case, it was way too easy for the team to say "Old Jim is just a grumpy old guy, cranky and he has a bad attitude" than it was to meet Jim half-way and go forward. I think there is a real and measurable communication problem in technology teams between age groups. I'm not sure what the magic bullet is going to be. Or if there is one.

coffee 15y ago
> But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong Honestly, this is one of the main reason I see that a lot of hiring managers LOVE young, inexperienced, recent college grads. They do not want to be told they are wrong. They want these people to shut their mouths, buckle down, and just continue with the death march. Even if the end result is failure, which it typically is, it's way easier to fail in this manner than it is to work hard at succeeding...

benmathes 15y ago

Learn new tools every few years. Focus on learning tool-agnostic things like how to build abstractions, working well in a team, coding processes, run-time complexity, and tool-agnostic concepts like closures/monads/etc.

brador 15y ago

The key point with tech is age matters little. If you have the skills, you'll have no trouble getting work. Yes, ageism is a slight problem of course, as with every profession, but programming is more a meritocracy than most other professions. Keep the skills sharp and relevant and you'll have few worries.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I'm curious where your evidence that there is only a slight ageism problem in tech. I think it is more prevelant than you are implying. I agree that keeping skills sharp is important, but I have seen where older people are assumed to be behind the curve, regardless of the value of wisdom gained through experience; where younger people are assumed to be ahead of the curve, regardless of the lack of any real experience. The ageism is subtle, but, as such, it has an equally pernicious effect on hiring.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

pnathan 15y ago

After a while, people get into their groove and don't want to get out. If the groove became a dead end in hiring, then they are in trouble when they next look for work. It shows up with older people because as you get more experienced (ie, older), you have a better change of having found your groove. I think continual learning is the only way to avoid this problem. edit: Also, after you've seen a few crunches for no good reason, you just don't want to be all eager beaver and work overtime without having a sound reason up front. So I think that turns off employers as well... rather pay someone cheap who works overtime than the expensive guy who laughs at the hopeless schedule.

mark_l_watson 15y ago
I agree with you that continual learning is a requirement for managing a career or calling. I am now 60 and I still get a more than enough work offers but I find that I am spending a larger fraction of my time in learning activities than I used to. Twenty years ago I probably averaged 5 or 6 hours a week doing technical reading and coding experiments; now I easily spend 10 to 15 hours a week in learning activities. Part of this re-emphasis is because I enjoy learning new things and part is because this effort is required to keep getting interesting work that I enjoy. Also, as I get older, I have no interest at all in management or team leadership. I just want to design and write code. Another thing that is almost as important as continual learning is what I would call "ego management." Most of us with decades of experience have had some spectacular successes in our careers but these are simply not relevant now. Live in the moment. I think that it is important to appreciate how much young people bring to the game in terms of entrepreneurship, creativity and job skills. I have no problems reducing my rates (inflation adjusted) as I get older to be in alignment with my current market value. I have an old friend who is not willing to do this, keeps his rates at very high levels, and gets no work. I have stopped talking to him about how much fun I have working.

joeycfan 15y ago

This is so true. Sometimes I think they're trying to put together a hockey team. Good luck in getting on that Mr. 40 year old.

RandallBrown 15y ago

Of course you're not going to get a job writing assembly, if that's really all you can/are willing to do you probably aren't the type of person I'd want to hire, even if the job was to write assembly. I'm 24 and work with plenty of older guys. One of them always makes fun of us mac developers because he was writing mac software before we were born and OS X isn't a "real" mac. He doesn't sit around complaining about the good old days of assembly, he learns new things. His experience follows the tech industry pretty closely as it moved from assembly to c to c++, etc. Now he writes Android apps. The point is that older guys only become irrelevant by choice. Programming is an industry with almost no up front cost to get started on. Anyone with a computer can do it. Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why don't they brush up on their development skills and learn something new?

a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
"Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why don't they brush up on their development skills and learn something new?" If those specific unemployed people all went home and learned Android development, most of them still wouldn't be hired, anywhere, not in tech (because they're old and unemployed) and not in "survival" jobs (because they're old, and they'll leave when they find something better). They're garbage as far as the economy is concerned. That the practice of refusing to consider unemployed people for hiring is common enough to warrant discussion partially supports that.
- RandallBrown 15y ago
  Just add the "freelancer" line to your resume and voila, you've no longer been unemployed for a few years. This also assumes that you've been doing something that could qualify as freelancing like working on some phone apps or a website or something. If you've been sitting on your ass for 2 years, yeah it's going to look pretty bad to employers.
  - wyclif 15y ago
    If they've been sitting on their ass. But when the economy tanked, a lot of people took the money they saved during the boom years and traveled the world. Or learned a new programming language. Or built something useful. So 2 year gaps in work history shouldn't be a deal killer. If they are, the system is truly, tragically broken.

pinaceae 15y ago

funny how a lot of techies here say, just re-learn every few years and you'll have no problems as you get older. bullshit. nobody hires a 55 year old javascript coder. i mean, just look at the usual suspects here on hackernews. look around you. and this is not about skills. but about money, plain and simple. if you've been working for 25 years, your salary demands have risen. at least that is what everyone assumes. so congrats on submitting your resume, but you'll get filtered out right away cause younger people are cheaper, with the same skill set. but isn't there added value in the wisdom that age brings? sure. but where is this a criterium? does a job posting for an experienced java coder mean that you should have been in the industry for at least 15 years? of course not. if you're reaching 50 in technology, you need to find an exit scenario. government, management, teaching.

a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
"if you're reaching 50 in technology, you need to find an exit scenario. government, management, teaching." Everyone's goal should be financial independence by 35, or as soon thereafter as you are able to accomplish.
- scotth 15y ago
  What do you mean by financial independence?
  - a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
    That you could not work another day and still survive in our economy with reasonable comfort and safety. In an industry like this, that focuses on the new, this will become critical for everyone at some point, although the point where it becomes critical will vary for each person. Hopefully everyone will be employable and viable as long as they want, but shit happens.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Good heavens. You need a good 1.5-2mil in capitol if we assume modest 3% returns on your money, if you want to live at $40k/year. How can everyone stockpile 1.5-2mil by the time they are 35? More importantly, what will happen to our economy if everyone stops working at 35?

ahoyhere 15y ago

Part of it is the older workers in question have outdated skills and probably act like "fuddy-duddies." I've worked with great tech types in their 40s plus, who are smart and present and current as well as wise and experienced… and I've worked with terrible ones who bellow like angry walruses (AGRGRAGRAH) and declare things to be done which are impossible. Including one who fell asleep in a meeting with our mutual client, snoring with his subnotebook on his belly, then woke up long enough to demand I make it so the web site "copied the data to the email in a table" when somebody dragged a "picture" from "The browser to email". After back and forths of me explaining that it couldn't be done, he eventually demanded, "WHY NOT?" and I, exasperated and having exhausted all my other explanations, said, "Because the internet doesn't work that way." And yet, one of us got hired as CTO and the other got fired from the project. (Hint: the young person got fired.) I think that in this, as with all questions of skill and desirability, the answer probably lies more in the worker themselves than the outside environment. That said, many of these companies want green young people because they will work for peanuts, can be manipulated, and don't know any better. Older workers tend to have a better sense of self, perspective, the need for work-life balance (because they have families, etc) and are less likely to sleep under their desk. This is the money line: "Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities." So is this: 'Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook, said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.”' This is code for: you have some skillz but no actual prospects (or you wouldn't want to work for us), so we'll label you "entrepreneurial" so you feel good about coming and working for the man right out of college, and we'll squeeze & overwork you as long as you don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way.

temphn 15y ago

Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of college. This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack didn't change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for more. No doubt there are many who'll argue with these facts. The last time this came up, a guy piped up saying that he'd hire a smart old programmer any day over a dumb young'un who knew node or Rails. That guy was advertising for a Rails dev in his profile. The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or company powered by older engineers. Note that discriminating against Jewish, Persian, Chinese, Korean, or Indian programmers would obviously lose you money, as those groups constitute a substantial fraction of the tech workforce. It is not so obvious that the market is economically irrational about the abilities of other groups. (Also: note how the article and the engineers all want to work at the best companies, and turn their noses up at the non-Facebooks and non-Googles they might need to "settle" for. What if employees couldn't freely discriminate regarding where they want to work? Does anyone stop to think that the companies they want to join so badly might know a thing or two about what kinds of people make good programmers?)

amcintyre 15y ago
Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of college. Nice generalization. Personally, over the last few years I've run into lots of "kids fresh out of college" that can't/won't work to learn skills they need to do their job. Game devs that don't know the math behind changing coordinate systems, and consequently write fragile rendering/UI code. Testers that won't write unit tests, and devs that won't write and/or run them to avoid creating new bugs. Early-career C++ coders that will argue to you that the OS won't let two threads touch a static variable at the same time. But I don't generalize that into assuming every young person is a lazy moron. I've also met some bright young people that will work hard to learn new theory/skills/languages/frameworks, and care about doing a good job. So I prefer to evaluate each person on their own merits, and that seems to work out a lot better. YMMV. If a company isn't interested in hiring me because they're afraid I have enough experience to know better than to work 80-hour weeks and take my work home for 50-75% of industry pay while making them rich, that's ok with me. I've got that T-shirt, and I don't want another one. This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack didn't change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for more. If simply learning the top of the latest tech stack every few years is making you a lot of money right now, you'd better start saving. I'm thinking something like this: http://www.despair.com/motivation.html http://www.despair.com/motivation.html The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or company powered by older engineers. Most people that are so inclined would rather start the company and power it with younger, more fungible people that don't know their own value. ;) Seriously, though, aren't most startup founders 40+ already?

jedberg 15y ago

This happened to my Dad. At 61, he has a long resume of experience, but it is experience in a lot of old technologies. He finally solved the problem though, by moving out of state. Last month, my Dad, a native a Los Angeles who has lived there his entire life, moved to Iowa. He basically had to find a company that was still running on old technology that actually respected experience.

mathattack 15y ago
Speaking from experience, they don't pay as well in Iowa as the coasts, but it is possible to find a job if you'll move to where they are. To generalize about the midwest, you have a lot of people who still spend their life at one company, and do respect the simpler work histories.
- jedberg 15y ago
  They don't pay as well in Iowa, but then again, the cost of living is a lot less.
  - mathattack 15y ago
    Indeed - it's a big tradeoff. It's probably 1/2 the cost of either coast, and you can send your kids to public schools without worrying about them getting mugged. But it speaks to the culture when cities brag about being, "Just 4 hours from Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha and St. Louis" A definite trade-off.
lrobb 15y ago
Curious... What tech is it?
- jedberg 15y ago
  JD Edwards and a bunch of other stuff I don't even know the name of. :)

spudlyo 15y ago

“Especially in social media, cloud computing and mobile apps, if you’re over 40 you’re perceived to be over the hill,” Ms. Stadelman said. Just as a counterpoint, I recently joined the ranks of a large social media company and was surprised to discover that 3/6 of the folks on the database engineering team (mysqlf included) are over 40, and all but one person is over 30.

pradocchia 15y ago
Database engineering is serious business, and pretty staid, NoSQL notwithstanding.
- wavetossed 15y ago
  NoSQL is also pretty serious business because what you are doing is deconstructing the relational database and assembling the bits that do the job that you need. A lot of NoSQL tools are marketed as doing far more than they really are capable of and you need real skills and knowledge of database internals to be able to navigate this treacherous area. That's why you see so many blogs about companies changing core NoSQL technologies.

B0Z 15y ago

This is just the way it is. Deal with it! Get in the game or GTFO the field. Sure, having the fire in your belly can mitigate much if not most of the "crochety" factor as can staying on the bleeding edge of coding and problem solving. But... if <insert random industry> didn't do this, if the biggest worry was keeping the old farts employed and coddling their irrelevance, <insert random industry> would NEVER progress. The US would be last in the world for meaningful product or service disruptions that every other country strives for. Again, at 42 with 16 years in technology, I'm one of the old farts. Skills that once got me the coveted double eyebrow raise and an extra digit on my bonus check, now get me the loathed single eyebrow raise and a comfy slot on the next RIF list. The union between a company and its employee base can be compared to a youthful first marriage between 20-somethings. Almost as soon as you say "I do", subconsciously, your will and desire to improve, to change, to grow starts to decline. You get fat. Your spouse gets fat. You gradually stop going out with friends or trying new things. Squirt out a couple of pups and you can pretty much write the excuses for why you can't do "this" or "that" in stone. The world is dynamic and the Indians, the Chinese, the South Americans, the Koreans, the Russians, pick your own example -- all of them -- understand this as a simple fact of life. From the moment they wake in the morning to the second their head hits the dirt floor at night, they are mentally and emotionally pounded with the relentless concept that they are NOT in first place. They are NOT the leader. They have miles and miles and miles to go before they can even begin to break into the same stratosphere of "advancement" that Westernized nations have taken for granted for the last 100 years. We provide for them a marker. A goal. A far-off, seemingly impossible to reach objective of what is possible when you push yourselves to limits you never knew you were capable of conquering. So, no. I don't feel sorry for the elder statesmen of <insert random industry>, and I'm even one of them. The very second I see my career plight as someone else's fault or the responsibility of something I can't control, I have already lost. I might as well close up shop and get my blue Wal-Mart vest on. Start practicing "would you like fry's with that". No. My position in technology is my responsibility. My relevance in comparison with you wiry fuckers 25 years my junior is 120% totally and without question not only my own responsibility, but my own choice. The truth is, if given even moderately comparable skills to you young lads on an interview, I have a leg up. I can run circles around the kids who still rent apartments and are still making payments on their first car. I have the benefit of patience that you only get from trying to do the same thing over and over 1000 times. I am more forward thinking, maybe not in terms of what the next Google is going to be, but in terms of execution, I can see things down the road that the whippersnappers can't see -- because they're not old enough to have seen the writing on the wall before. No. I am old (in Internet years), but I am not a victim. And when industry moves forward without me, the blame lies on me and MY decision to keep up. You young kids do have your uses though. You keep me and my ilk on our toes and are anything but shy about how fast and nimble I have to be to keep up.

tlogan 15y ago

In early 2000s, Silicon Valley was changed from a hardware hub (HP, IBM, etc.) to a software hub (Oracle, Informatica, Google, etc.). And now it is changing from software hub to "social networking" + "new business models" hub which unfortunately do not require hard core engineering skills. For example web design skills are very much in demand. I'm in 40s, and I wanted to move from my corporate job to something like start up I found out that majority of jobs in new startups are to get young people (so called talents) to work on simple applications for under-market wage (wages which are ok if you don't have any dependents) with benefits and "culture" intentionally set up to attract only young people.

SethMurphy 15y ago

It's simple: build something relevant or at least interesting. If you can do this you probably don't need a job. The bottom line is tech is for people obsessed with learning and creating. For many people, with age those obsession wear thin as the hair on their head.

CCs 15y ago

The age has nothing to do with it. It is all about accomplishments. Some people would have no problem getting hired. Think of Peter Norvig (56), Larry Wall (57), Guido van Rossum (55), Linus Torvalds (42). And you don't have to be this famous. Ex. publish a good iPhone app on GitHub, offers will start to flow in.

ootachi 15y ago
None of those people are employable, except as vanity hires at companies like Google. Think about it -- why would it be in a company's best interests to hire Linus Torvalds? They can get the kernel for free.
- greenyoda 15y ago
  They'd be interested in hiring Linus because he's a very smart and resourceful guy who can communicate well and knows a lot about hardware and software and how to manage a large development project.
- CCs 15y ago
  When I create a new architecture / design I would love to be able to chat even 10 min with a "vanity hire". Advice, 2nd opinion or just a different perspective - it saves you from months of dead ends...

lcargill99 15y ago

Lastday, Capricorn 29's. Year of the City: 2274. Carousel begins...

LVB 15y ago

At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to (and do) maintain my skills, and really don't see myself morphing into the old fuddy-duddy (completely not my nature, and even my youngest colleagues agree). That said, there are some significant life-style challenges that work against simply keeping one's skills sharp. Out of college I wanted to change the world, had all to gain and nothing to lose, just moved and had no family obligations, was surrounded by likewise eager entrepreneurs who were plugged into technology, and I could spend all day and night burrowing into whatever the latest thing was. In short, I could easily commit the vast amount of my time to tech and was naturally on top of things. Not so today! Wife, kids, and a mortgage means drastically reduced time for such endeavors, and a much greater responsibility to provide a stable income (hopefully with benefits too). Add to that, I'm not hanging out in bars after work surrounded by other sources of tech insight, which was always a great way to learn of new things and get a feel for where things are heading. Instead, I'm heading home, because there are a lot of non-tech things to take care of. This doesn't mean I throw in the towel. I carve out time where I can and work my ass off to stay abreast of changing technology, including working on side projects for more real-world practice. I burn some of my much-valued vacation time to get to a conference each year. And I'm cool with the way things are going. But I'm also realistic... Am I going to be burning whole weekends in 48 hour hackathons? Not likely, and least in my situation. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't emulate the behavior of an early 20's developer in Silicon Valley. But I can do things that I think keep me reasonably useful to employers. Most important: this is not at all due to age, but rather due to life circumstances that often come with getting older. When I'm 45 or 50, I will not be the genius who is cranking out the next Node.js in a weekend, but I highly doubt I'll be sitting at city hall waiting for f*cking Promatch to find me a job either.

velshin 15y ago
Well said.

hexis 15y ago

You can always interpret bad hiring practices as damage and route around them. My wife and I run our own tech business and I don't think any of our customers ever has or ever will care how old we are.

dkrich 15y ago

I would be very careful about applying generalizations here. This article is very vague about what constitutes an "advanced degree in engineering" and exactly what "a decade of experience in the technology sector" means. Not all employees are created equal and this type of study smacks of a certain statistical bias- ie, only the least qualified workers (those lacking the desired skillsets and experience, preferred degrees, etc.) will be the one's out of work. Therefore, to take those who are struggling to find work and project that onto the industry as a whole is to take a fairly protracted view of a complex situation. I'm not saying that the author's proposed explanation is impossible, just that it is only one of many plausible explanations, and without more information it would be a mistake to take any firm conclusions from this.

greenyoda 15y ago
The other obvious statistical bias is that the article is only covering Silicon Valley, which is hardly the entire tech industry.

jasonkester 15y ago

There are two basic flavors of "old guy" in tech. We've all worked with the ex-mainframe guy who still thinks at a punchcard pace and never really wrapped his head around all this web stuff. He liked his old, stable job at Epson because they had good benefits and a pension plan, but then the economy took a downturn and now he's on your team. Many of us have worked with the other type too, with 40 years of kicking ass under his belt, who can code you under the table in javascript and ruby as easily as he can in C (or FORTRAN if he feels like messing with you). As you make your way through this world, you get to choose which of those types you'd like to become. If you don't want the New York Times to write sympathy articles about you, I'd suggest going with the latter route.

kabdib 15y ago
I work with a developer who is 70. He kicks butt. It's amazing. My father in law retired at 75, a C coder doing embedded systems for the chip industry. He didn't kick people around, but was respected and was getting stuff done. I'm 50. I'd be happy to be either of those two people. I have little sympathy for the people who say to themselves that they can stuff the career growth at 40 because they're doomed. Screw that, I have role models. One thing that seems to help is: Be on a mission. Be on a fucking mission from God, take charge of design AND do all the little crap. Build system maintenance and code cleanup, who does that? Hint: It's not scutwork to make sure that things are working well, all throughout a project.

seclorum 15y ago

I'm 42 and have managed to survive 25 years professionally in the computer world, primarily as a software developer. There is one, hard, fast rule for survival as a developer, and it has worked very well for me for years. I will share it with you: Follow the platform. Programming is all about the hardware. How does it work? Its simple - programming on Windows for x86? Get yourself a Mac and learn to hack on it in your spare time (by the way: no television or other sedentary 'entertainment' activities - entertain yourself by learning new things). Already a Mac code - get an iPhone, or learn Android. An iOS developer already? Android master already? Alright then, time to get a Beagleboard and do some Linux hacking. Already hacked on Linux? Get into CUDA. CUDA genius already - okay, how about some of that Cloud tech .. There is no safety in platform mastery, because those platforms are like slippery barrels, spinning around and around, slowly sinking into redundancy. If you are employed for one platform, entertain yourself with learning to master another, newer or more interesting one. This works, over and over.

seclorum 15y ago

lrobb 15y ago

Related: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-da...

mahyarm 15y ago

The place I work at has a majority of 30 somethings and 40 somethings. We do C++/C & various mobile platforms.

wavephorm 15y ago

I bet there's a pile of 20 year olds with some jQuery and Rails under their belt, consider themselves a ninja rockstar, and this scenario won't happen to them cause jQuery rocks, and rails will be around forever and ever... Guess what... you'll all be out of work in 10 years unless you work your ass off to keep up. The computing world is changing faster than I ever remember. We are entering a new computing paradigm faster than most people will be able to upgrade their skills. If you aren't hacking your iPad, and you don't build mobile apps, have no NLP or machine learning experience, and you aren't hacking away at Kinect in your spare time, then your livelihood is gravely in danger. Welcome to the game.

lrobb 15y ago

I can never resist... From a recruiter I know: "A doctor, a lawyer and an Accountant with 30 years experience is probably a semi-reitred millionaire. A software engineer with 30 years experience is probably out of work." Or doing an hourly contract to keep some money coming in.

theDaveB 15y ago

Am 42 and went into software development at 15. I didn't really finish school and managed to land a job as a trainee programmer (told the company I was basically finished at school but had to back for my exams, I never did). I never really learnt new skills much after VB 6 (missed the whole .net thing), I got sick of having to learn new stuff every few years. I was a MCSD but that was nothing, read a book, sit a exam. I left IT and took up photography for a few years, tried to get back in and have never had a interview. I am now doing the odd website for friends and trying to make my first iPad App. Dave

brianm 15y ago

Frankly, if there are a lot of older folks (40 is older? I am in deep, deep trouble) with lots of experience having trouble finding jobs, then this is a ripe market to recruit from. Of course, I have a funny perspective -- I work with a guy who wrote compilers for Symbolics, and another who started programming before I was born (and I am in the supposedly-being-age-discriminated-against category). Between the two of them, and two more folks my own tender middle-age, they are the most productive, awesome folks I know and hope to keep working with for a long time to come. Seriously, if this is reality then start recruiting "old folks" -- you now have an unfair advantage in terms of recruiting.

o2sd 15y ago

"An Industry Moves On." LOL. Here's a little secret from a 43yo programmer making the best $$$ of his career. MOST SOFTWARE IS NOT BUILT BY SOFTWARE COMPANIES. Sure, everyone knows about Google, and Facebook, and for my fellow genXers, Microsoft. The truth is though, the code that gets written at those companies and other software companies like them is a tiny fraction of the all code that gets written. All over the economy, companies that are NOT software companies are writing code to DO STUFF. Sure Facebook is highly visible, 'valued at 100 BEEELLLIION dollars', and what all the cool kids are into. But really, who gives a shit about a feed of photos and asinine updates. Yes, it's like soap operas. Always popular, always mildly profitable, and if it disappeared tomorrow, the economy wouldn't notice. Real companies, on the other hand, need to build software to improve their business. Your productivity at those companies will depend on you getting some 'Domain Knowledge'. Yes, I know it's like getting your hands dirty, but if you want to prosper in software development as you get older, then you will need to add domain knowledge to your skill set. Ah! But which domains? Pick the hardest ones, is my advice. Ten years ago I would have said Financial Markets, but we are coming to the end of that gravy train. Financial Markets is a hard domain. It's difficulty makes it very difficult to find programmers who understand the domain enough to be productive, hence programmers who do have that knowledge are in very high demand. And no, they don't give a shit about how old you are. In the future, I think the fields of bio-informatics, robotic control, logistics, traffic control (and other N-P hard problems) will present great opportunities for older programmers to find niche domains to excel at and add longevity to your programming career. If you are young and you want to try your hand at a startup, do it now. If it works out, more power to you. If not, and you want to build a long career in software development, then find difficult and complex domains/industries and learn about them, because even if they don't build software now, they will in the future, and for that they are going to need programmers who understand the domain, not domain experts that can hack together some code.