6 ms·

I'm 31, and I have coworkers in their late 30s and early 40s, working in a large multinational with legacy systems. The truth is, while it doesn't get that muc

I'm 31, and I have coworkers in their late 30s and early 40s, working in a large multinational with legacy systems. The truth is, while it doesn't get that much mentally harder to learn new technologies, it is very hard psychologically. For someone used to a large paycheck, to being the go-to guy in the technology and set in their 9-to-5 ways, to get out of their comfort zone, and admit that what they know is no longer relevant is scary as hell, especially for those with families. So, rather than update themselves and make up all that lost ground from getting too comfortable, they'll try to keep in place the old legacy systems only they can maintain. I got caught in that trap too, one of my main responsibilities is maintaining a Forte 4GL system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL ). While I've kept myself relatively up to date, it was on Microsoft .NET technology only, and I'm still a few years behind. I wanted to supplement my income, and took a look at the online marketplace, and it confirmed what Hacker News was already showing me: my skills are useless, I don't know Ruby, Javascript, the open source stacks, Amazon Web Services or anything currently relevant and in demand. I can either try to switch into management, or accept I'm obsolete and take a large pay cut (or try to improve myself on the side, probably by trying to do a startup) if I want to stay relevant.

hkarthik 15y ago
I was in a similar boat, and I decided to take the pay cut and spend a few years building my way back up. I'm much happier this way than I ever would have been in a managerial role that I never wanted.
- GFischer 15y ago
  Thank you :) . However, I think I could be happy in a managerial role. As long as I'm solving problems, facing challenges and feeling relevant, I don't believe I need to be the one doing the coding :)
jiggy2011 15y ago
To be fair far more programmers today (even new ones) will be familiar with .Net than they will be with Ruby (and complex JS probably). I can see .Net sticking around for a while in one form or anther. Also AWS really isn't that complicated (at least from what I have used which is only really S3). Just think of it as another layer of abstraction around your Filesystem (FTP/Rsync with bells). You can figure S3 out in a few hours and I can't imagine EC2 being much more difficult if you're already familiar with Unix. I think the crux of the problem here though is that you take a risk whenever you devote any significant time to learning a specific technology as to whether it will still be relevant in a few years. This problem is made worse by the fact that often your employer will make that choice for you. Imagine being a young hire at your first coding job with ambitions of moving on to a career at Google after a couple of years to then be told that you are to be transferred to the COBOL/FORTRAN team where you will spend the next 2 years. I think this is probably part of the reason that many developers are so keen to re-implement perfectly working systems in new languages. They will try and sell their boss on the benefits of technology XYZ and how it will be good for the business when really in the back of their mind they are thinking "I desperately want out of this job and XYZ would look great on my CV".
brandall10 15y ago
I'm 36, and you sound exactly like me when I was 31. Same situation, surrounded by a team who was on average 10 years older than myself married with children, working on mostly legacy stuff. Nobody seemed to really care much about their jobs, just wallowing in skill rot. When I was 32/33 or so I was offered to go into management. I turned down that management offer, kicked butt where I could and got promoted to a principal engineer. It was at that point I realized I was in a dead end job, went nuts in my free time reading book after book, tutorial after tutorial... and two years later finally summoned the courage to do a Rails project pro-bono on the side for a small local marketing firm; for about 4 mos I was putting in 60-70 hour weeks between my day job and side gig. Now I have another Rails project lined up for a NYC fashion site that pays about 15% more per hour than my day job and I've been contacted for no less than 5 full time Rails positions, one of which I interviewed for and turned down. The demand for this stack is fierce. And you know what? I'm madly head-over-heels in love with the latest and greatest the web has to offer (ie. meteor.js gives me goosebumps, and at the very least in the near term I want to do a front-end mvc project ala backbone). I'm not great - yet - but I feel like for once I'm really in the game. It's exhilarating. I feel more alive than I have since my early 20s. This NYC contract is about to be signed, and once that happens I'll be saying goodbye to the windows world altogether, join a co-working space, build a network, go to local tech meetups, etc, to ensure I have a steady stream of work. It also helps to have at least 6 mos of savings in the bank to mitigate risk. Seriously, go thru easy/free books like Learn Python the Hard Way, Eloquent Javascript, Michael Hart's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, the tutorials on the W3C site. You should be able to do all that in a couple months, and that's probably 50% of the battle (okay - there's alot more, but once you have some foundation the rest will be much easier). EDIT: Wanted to mention about the full time Rails positions, 3 were for small startups, 2 for larger companies. Naturally the small startups you can expect to take a pay cut if you're mostly maxxed out in your compensation in your respective area. But the 2 corporate Rails gigs the recruiters wanted to put me in at or slightly above my total compensation package at my current job (partly due to those being a mixed environment and needing someone with both C#/C++ and Rails skills).
- smountcastle 15y ago
  Be careful. "Now I have another Rails project lined up for a NYC fashion site that pays about 15% more per hour than my day job" Contracting is vastly different than being an employee. Your employer pays considerably more than 15% more per hour for you (employer portion of taxes, portion of health insurance , etc.) As a contractor you'll be responsible for those expenses.
lucisferre 15y ago
I think you may be seeing a bit of a confirmation bias. Naturally with any group of people who stick it out in one company for a long time you are going to see "lifers". These people are complacent in there careers. They know they aren't getting fired and they are happy not going anywhere. As a result these people are not naturally life long learners either. I wouldn't use 40 something developers in a large multinational as a representative sample. As the saying go, it's easy to retain average people, it's the exceptional people it's hard to keep around for long. Also you mentioned .NET, the .NET ecosystem and culture is notoriously corporate, and not very innovative or leading edge, again that's not to say all of .NET is like that, but a large multinational is likely to fit that model pretty well.
- chris_wot 15y ago
  I'm not really sure I can agree that .NET isn't leading edge. For instance, it's been implementing dynamic language support, LINQ, and ASP.NET MVC is no slouch either. As a framework, I'd say that it's actually pretty advanced.
  - lucisferre 15y ago
    What I mean is that .NET as a culture and ecosystem is not full of people who embrace leading edge. Though, since you bring it up, as far as features it still isn't leading anything, just following reasonably close to a lot of others.
    - chris_wot 15y ago
      Again, I disagree. It is full of people who embrace the leading edge. Just look at the IronRuby early adopters, or the folks who embraced WCF and WPF. This seems like your perception of thingS, not reality.
      - lucisferre 15y ago
        A vast, vast minority of the whole are early adopters. How many .NET shops actually use IronRuby or even F#. Besides, I'm not sure what's so leading edge about bringing Ruby to .NET. Ruby is 10 years old and Java has had an implementation for much longer. I also have no idea what is leading edge about WCF (or WPF for that matter) though I really like the work Glenn Block has done recently for WCF and much of it is arguably very cutting edge REST stuff, so there are certainly exceptions, but they are just that exceptions. If you're point is that MS shops are quick to embrace MS christened technologies, well that is relatively speaking true. However MS is often well behind the technology curve of even the .NET open source community (monorail predates MVC significantly) and generally speaking even further behind the ecosystems outside of .NET. Bottom line, I see no evidence to support a claim that .NET development supports a significant culture of early adopters.
adrianhoward 15y ago
So, rather than update themselves and make up all that lost ground from getting too comfortable, they'll try to keep in place the old legacy systems only they can maintain. The flip side of that problem is dealing with the bright young things of all ages who thinks it'll be a couple of weeks work to rewrite that COBOL legacy app in in Clojure/MongoDB. Y'know - the one that's been correctly doing the interest payments for the last twenty years. How hard could it be?.... Guess what's not fixed one year and £200k later... :-)
- GFischer 15y ago
  Heh, that Forte app I was talking about? Plenty of people thought it would be "easy" to replace parts of it... at least two projects failed, I succeeded replacing part of it with a .NET program (the data entry part). Every new manager thinks about replacing it, and then realize it's insane. Now we're looking at buying a proven software package - even though its price will be in the millions of dollars, it's better than trying to build it ourselves (I estimated three million dollars for an in-house project, and a big chance of failure, most certainly not satisfying user's expectations).
spatten 15y ago
This is going to sound more dramatic than it was, but here's one way of summarizing the last five years of my life: I was 35, working at a great job as a physicist. Amazing team (I was usually the dumbest guy in the room), amazing project, but I was bored. I knew that if this didn't make me happy, I needed to get out. I read a few PG essays, caught the startup bug, and started coding in the evenings. Within 8 months, with a brand-new daughter and another that was two, I was gone from that job, working on my own. In that 8 months I had taught myself web-dev from scratch. I knew nothing of Ruby, HTML, CSS or JavaScript. I had a smattering of Unix knowledge and had been coding data-analysis in Python and C for a while, but the amount I had to learn was staggering. I bought tons of books, learned tons, and (luckily) had no idea how much I still had to learn. The first startup idea (online graphing software for physicists -- I didn't exactly reach far for the idea) was a complete flop. That's okay, though. I turned to consulting for a while. Gave some talks. Wrote part of a book. Met my co-founder by consulting for him for a while. Now, things are good. Leanpub is growing steadily, and I couldn't be happier. The point is, that you can and should teach yourself some new skills. You're way closer to being employable than I was, that's for sure. It may take some evenings and weekends, but they'll be some of the most fun evening and weekends you ever have. Find something that you want to do and build it. Fall in love with the idea, but be ready to dump it for something better. The market for people with even a smattering of Rails knowledge is huge. iPhone dev is bigger. or Erlang. or fancy JavaScript using Socket.IO. Location doesn't matter. Age doesn't matter (I'm 40 now, in Vancouver, not in SV, and I bet I could find 10 jobs at the drop of a hat). My blog isn't huge. My startup hasn't had "an exit". There are excuses, and there is getting out there and having a blast learning and making your life better. Seems like an easy choice. Go kick some ass.
- thoughtpalette 15y ago
  This. Always push yourself to learn.

hkarthik 15y ago

I was in a similar boat, and I decided to take the pay cut and spend a few years building my way back up. I'm much happier this way than I ever would have been in a managerial role that I never wanted.

GFischer 15y ago
Thank you :) . However, I think I could be happy in a managerial role. As long as I'm solving problems, facing challenges and feeling relevant, I don't believe I need to be the one doing the coding :)

jiggy2011 15y ago

To be fair far more programmers today (even new ones) will be familiar with .Net than they will be with Ruby (and complex JS probably). I can see .Net sticking around for a while in one form or anther. Also AWS really isn't that complicated (at least from what I have used which is only really S3). Just think of it as another layer of abstraction around your Filesystem (FTP/Rsync with bells). You can figure S3 out in a few hours and I can't imagine EC2 being much more difficult if you're already familiar with Unix. I think the crux of the problem here though is that you take a risk whenever you devote any significant time to learning a specific technology as to whether it will still be relevant in a few years. This problem is made worse by the fact that often your employer will make that choice for you. Imagine being a young hire at your first coding job with ambitions of moving on to a career at Google after a couple of years to then be told that you are to be transferred to the COBOL/FORTRAN team where you will spend the next 2 years. I think this is probably part of the reason that many developers are so keen to re-implement perfectly working systems in new languages. They will try and sell their boss on the benefits of technology XYZ and how it will be good for the business when really in the back of their mind they are thinking "I desperately want out of this job and XYZ would look great on my CV".

brandall10 15y ago

I'm 36, and you sound exactly like me when I was 31. Same situation, surrounded by a team who was on average 10 years older than myself married with children, working on mostly legacy stuff. Nobody seemed to really care much about their jobs, just wallowing in skill rot. When I was 32/33 or so I was offered to go into management. I turned down that management offer, kicked butt where I could and got promoted to a principal engineer. It was at that point I realized I was in a dead end job, went nuts in my free time reading book after book, tutorial after tutorial... and two years later finally summoned the courage to do a Rails project pro-bono on the side for a small local marketing firm; for about 4 mos I was putting in 60-70 hour weeks between my day job and side gig. Now I have another Rails project lined up for a NYC fashion site that pays about 15% more per hour than my day job and I've been contacted for no less than 5 full time Rails positions, one of which I interviewed for and turned down. The demand for this stack is fierce. And you know what? I'm madly head-over-heels in love with the latest and greatest the web has to offer (ie. meteor.js gives me goosebumps, and at the very least in the near term I want to do a front-end mvc project ala backbone). I'm not great - yet - but I feel like for once I'm really in the game. It's exhilarating. I feel more alive than I have since my early 20s. This NYC contract is about to be signed, and once that happens I'll be saying goodbye to the windows world altogether, join a co-working space, build a network, go to local tech meetups, etc, to ensure I have a steady stream of work. It also helps to have at least 6 mos of savings in the bank to mitigate risk. Seriously, go thru easy/free books like Learn Python the Hard Way, Eloquent Javascript, Michael Hart's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, the tutorials on the W3C site. You should be able to do all that in a couple months, and that's probably 50% of the battle (okay - there's alot more, but once you have some foundation the rest will be much easier). EDIT: Wanted to mention about the full time Rails positions, 3 were for small startups, 2 for larger companies. Naturally the small startups you can expect to take a pay cut if you're mostly maxxed out in your compensation in your respective area. But the 2 corporate Rails gigs the recruiters wanted to put me in at or slightly above my total compensation package at my current job (partly due to those being a mixed environment and needing someone with both C#/C++ and Rails skills).

smountcastle 15y ago
Be careful. "Now I have another Rails project lined up for a NYC fashion site that pays about 15% more per hour than my day job" Contracting is vastly different than being an employee. Your employer pays considerably more than 15% more per hour for you (employer portion of taxes, portion of health insurance , etc.) As a contractor you'll be responsible for those expenses.

lucisferre 15y ago

I think you may be seeing a bit of a confirmation bias. Naturally with any group of people who stick it out in one company for a long time you are going to see "lifers". These people are complacent in there careers. They know they aren't getting fired and they are happy not going anywhere. As a result these people are not naturally life long learners either. I wouldn't use 40 something developers in a large multinational as a representative sample. As the saying go, it's easy to retain average people, it's the exceptional people it's hard to keep around for long. Also you mentioned .NET, the .NET ecosystem and culture is notoriously corporate, and not very innovative or leading edge, again that's not to say all of .NET is like that, but a large multinational is likely to fit that model pretty well.

chris_wot 15y ago
I'm not really sure I can agree that .NET isn't leading edge. For instance, it's been implementing dynamic language support, LINQ, and ASP.NET MVC is no slouch either. As a framework, I'd say that it's actually pretty advanced.
- lucisferre 15y ago
  What I mean is that .NET as a culture and ecosystem is not full of people who embrace leading edge. Though, since you bring it up, as far as features it still isn't leading anything, just following reasonably close to a lot of others.
  - chris_wot 15y ago
    Again, I disagree. It is full of people who embrace the leading edge. Just look at the IronRuby early adopters, or the folks who embraced WCF and WPF. This seems like your perception of thingS, not reality.
    - lucisferre 15y ago
      A vast, vast minority of the whole are early adopters. How many .NET shops actually use IronRuby or even F#. Besides, I'm not sure what's so leading edge about bringing Ruby to .NET. Ruby is 10 years old and Java has had an implementation for much longer. I also have no idea what is leading edge about WCF (or WPF for that matter) though I really like the work Glenn Block has done recently for WCF and much of it is arguably very cutting edge REST stuff, so there are certainly exceptions, but they are just that exceptions. If you're point is that MS shops are quick to embrace MS christened technologies, well that is relatively speaking true. However MS is often well behind the technology curve of even the .NET open source community (monorail predates MVC significantly) and generally speaking even further behind the ecosystems outside of .NET. Bottom line, I see no evidence to support a claim that .NET development supports a significant culture of early adopters.

adrianhoward 15y ago

So, rather than update themselves and make up all that lost ground from getting too comfortable, they'll try to keep in place the old legacy systems only they can maintain. The flip side of that problem is dealing with the bright young things of all ages who thinks it'll be a couple of weeks work to rewrite that COBOL legacy app in in Clojure/MongoDB. Y'know - the one that's been correctly doing the interest payments for the last twenty years. How hard could it be?.... Guess what's not fixed one year and £200k later... :-)

GFischer 15y ago
Heh, that Forte app I was talking about? Plenty of people thought it would be "easy" to replace parts of it... at least two projects failed, I succeeded replacing part of it with a .NET program (the data entry part). Every new manager thinks about replacing it, and then realize it's insane. Now we're looking at buying a proven software package - even though its price will be in the millions of dollars, it's better than trying to build it ourselves (I estimated three million dollars for an in-house project, and a big chance of failure, most certainly not satisfying user's expectations).

spatten 15y ago

This is going to sound more dramatic than it was, but here's one way of summarizing the last five years of my life: I was 35, working at a great job as a physicist. Amazing team (I was usually the dumbest guy in the room), amazing project, but I was bored. I knew that if this didn't make me happy, I needed to get out. I read a few PG essays, caught the startup bug, and started coding in the evenings. Within 8 months, with a brand-new daughter and another that was two, I was gone from that job, working on my own. In that 8 months I had taught myself web-dev from scratch. I knew nothing of Ruby, HTML, CSS or JavaScript. I had a smattering of Unix knowledge and had been coding data-analysis in Python and C for a while, but the amount I had to learn was staggering. I bought tons of books, learned tons, and (luckily) had no idea how much I still had to learn. The first startup idea (online graphing software for physicists -- I didn't exactly reach far for the idea) was a complete flop. That's okay, though. I turned to consulting for a while. Gave some talks. Wrote part of a book. Met my co-founder by consulting for him for a while. Now, things are good. Leanpub is growing steadily, and I couldn't be happier. The point is, that you can and should teach yourself some new skills. You're way closer to being employable than I was, that's for sure. It may take some evenings and weekends, but they'll be some of the most fun evening and weekends you ever have. Find something that you want to do and build it. Fall in love with the idea, but be ready to dump it for something better. The market for people with even a smattering of Rails knowledge is huge. iPhone dev is bigger. or Erlang. or fancy JavaScript using Socket.IO. Location doesn't matter. Age doesn't matter (I'm 40 now, in Vancouver, not in SV, and I bet I could find 10 jobs at the drop of a hat). My blog isn't huge. My startup hasn't had "an exit". There are excuses, and there is getting out there and having a blast learning and making your life better. Seems like an easy choice. Go kick some ass.

thoughtpalette 15y ago
This. Always push yourself to learn.