36 ms·

Sucks to be an old engineer

• elhector 13y ago
  One of the best engineers I have worked with is on his 60's. When I worked with him, the rest of the engineering team had an average age of 23 or so (me being 32), but this guy could give everyone a run for their money. This is not about age, but about staying current and sharp. Keep learning, and you won't have this issue. Sure, a guy fresh out of school has a ton of energy and works crazy hours, but as an Engineering Manager and Product Manager I knew that if I needed something to be really done on time I could always trust the older (and quite frankly way smarter) guy.
  • riggins 13y ago
    This is not about age, but about staying current and sharp. Yep. I don't know why these types of posts get so many comments. It seems really obvious.
  • UK-AL 13y ago
    How can average age be 23? At 23 your still a new grad. The entire company was composed of new grads?
• jlas 13y ago
  This article is incredibly terse and uninformative. Why are older engineers having such a hard time? Are they keeping up with new technologies to remain competitive? What kind of engineering are we even talking about?
  • kjackson2012 13y ago
    The problem of ageism is pretty well documented in engineering, especially software engineering. I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage. It's too bad because I would rather just program.
    • cunac 13y ago
      why you think you will not be able to compete? I am similar age and really don't see age as issue if you can do the job. Even money is not something you need to compromise
  • varjag 13y ago
    I witnessed three different engineers in two different companies turned down late in the interview process by upper management due to their age. Prior to that I ran the technical part of interview and green-lighted the candidates. The problem is real and when it happens, whatever skill set you have is irrelevant.
    • Turing_Machine 13y ago
      Your upper management is playing with fire if the candidates were over forty (at least in the U.S. -- other countries probably vary). That's just as illegal as turning them down because they happened to be female or black.
      • auctiontheory 13y ago
        I don't think he meant that upper management gave "advanced age" as the written reason for rejection.
        • michaelochurch 13y ago
          People never talk about age at work. They talk about "graduation date". If you work in recruiting, you have companies asking that question all the time, "What's his graduation date?" I wonder if there could be a boom, especially with the online options, in mid-40s programmers getting graduate degrees so as to jam the signals. That's what I'll do if I end up facing age discrimination, so long as I can solve the money problem.
          • Turing_Machine 13y ago
            'They talk about "graduation date".' Good luck with that if someone files a suit.
            • michaelochurch 13y ago
              Hey, I never said I'm a fan of that behavior. I'm against it. I feel like being a jerk to older people is just asking karma to kick you in the ass. Except for those who die young, which is a rarity at this point, everyone will get old.
  • clarkm 13y ago
    To be fair, this post is just rehashing the point that the blogger (Lion of the Blogosphere, formerly known as HalfSigma) has been making for 5+ years now. He's a Manhattan-based lawyer who really doesn't like software developers, and is constantly warning his readers not to let their kids major in computer science. He cites outsourcing, stagnating wages, lack of long-term career development, and perceived low status as reasons why one should stay away from most things in tech, especially anything that could be conflated with "programming" or "IT" by people outside the tech world. Then again, he doesn't offer any real alternative advice. It's usually some variation of "be rich and work at a non-profit".
• pvnick 13y ago
  What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.
  • ianstallings 13y ago
    I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are usually people or process related. If a project fails or succeeds depends much more on who does the work and how it gets planned and executed than what particular language or techniques you use. So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.
    • mavelikara 13y ago
      Do you have any advice/pointers for someone who is looking to get started on this path?
  • pjmorris 13y ago
    Learn 'the next thing' and get jobs (or volunteer!) doing 'the next thing', mod customer needs, your career goals and your tolerance for risk and change. I've moved from Fortran to PL/1 to C to C++ to VB5/VB6 to ASP to PHP to ASP.NET to R. It isn't pretty, but I've stayed employed for 30 years now, mostly in places that suited my needs/goals. Smarter people with better goals should have better career histories than I.
  • a3n 13y ago
    I think the better course is to follow the Mr Money Mustache idea. Plan, save and invest on purpose, so that you can retire if you want to, or are forced to. Then do whatever you want. You don't have to retire, you can do exactly what you're doing now if you like. If no one wants what you do ... do something else, or "retire" (whatever that means to you).
• MaggieL 13y ago
  It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills. I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012. I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.
  • rlu 13y ago
    Good for you and happy birthday! May 30th here.
  • hashset 13y ago
    Awesome. Good luck!
  • onemorepassword 13y ago
    You're my new hero.
  • morganwilde 13y ago
    You should write a counter-post expanding on what you've said, because this, especially the ending "choose yourself a new profession", is super out-of-whack. All the power to people like you, Ma'am!
    • gruseom 13y ago
      I'm guessing MaggieL is not a Sir? All the more interesting if so.
      • morganwilde 13y ago
        I didn't even assume to look at the alias, since in my mind there was no doubt a man was behind that statement... Fixed my comment :) and this made me want to read a blog post from MaggieL even more so!
  • MetaCosm 13y ago
    One of the sharpest developers I have ever worked with -- was 63. He did only mobile development and only would agree to work 30 hours a week. When I pressed him on it, he explained that he liked to constantly be working on both Android and iOS projects, 30 hours a week each, and that kept his backlog of waiting clients happy. EDIT: He completed the iOS application under budget with wonderful tests.
• onemorepassword 13y ago
  A 40 year old degree in anything alone isn't good enough to stay employed in any field. Except maybe teaching.
  • dyno12345 13y ago
    You make it sound like these people haven't been working in the field since they got the degree
    • manmal 13y ago
      I'd say they are optimizing locally. Yes, if you could write Cobol in the 70s/80s, you better optimized on writing Cobol, because it was all the hotness. But you should have stepped out of this local optimum somewhere in the 90s, and switched to OO languages. Moving away from what you already know in favor of something you don't yet know is painful if you are not used to it, but it's necessary - dinosaurs die.
    • lobotryas 13y ago
      They may have been working, however there's zero guarantee that they have been learning anything new or even spending hands-on time doing engineering work (as opposed to shuttling between meetings). I interview 2-3 candidates a week, including many people almost twice my age. While these older engineers have impressive-sounding resumes (IBM, Sun/Oracle) most struggle to code anything more complex than fizzubzz. In my case I make it as easy as possible for the candidates by allowing them to use any IDE they can install on my Macbook and encouraging them to search Google/StackOverflow if they get stuck because I want them to be comfortable and actually complete the task. Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page.
      • rimantas 13y ago
        > Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple > JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page. Somehow I doubt the result is different for younger ones.
• rayiner 13y ago
  This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk): 1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3) Start a company. My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).
  • gems 13y ago
    What is a line engineer?
    • klochner 13y ago
      non-managing software engineer - you write code.
      • gems 13y ago
        Is it looked down upon if you don't go up in the ranks as you age?
        • rayiner 13y ago
          This is true in most fields. In the officer ranks of the military, you're generally forced into retirement if you're passed up for promotion twice. In many government jobs, you're forced out if one of your former subordinates is promoted past you.
          • smcl 13y ago
            Only twice? I've never know the ins and outs of the military (and ex-PFC Wintergreen is the closest I'll probably ever know to people being demoted or missing promotion) however this seems incredibly harsh.
            • 13y ago
• frostmatthew 13y ago
  I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
  • timr 13y ago
    Doctors and lawyers gain skill as they get older because the problems and solutions don't change quickly, and the fields have such depth that expertise takes decades to acquire. We work in an industry where the state-of-the-art is perpetually accessible to 20-somethings who haven't done anything, because the technology gets blown up once a decade (or so). Even if you stay up to date, why would anyone pay you a salary commensurate with your experience, when a total noob can do the same work for half as much? For example, it's pretty embarrassing that we're re-inventing databases because today's generation of "experts" can't be bothered to understand SQL. And don't get me started on how an entire generation of coders will be able to work professionally without knowing how to manage memory. It isn't difficult to find examples of youth and exuberance trumping wisdom in this field -- I've already encountered working developers who are happy to tell me how technologies invented in the early part of this decade are "totally outdated".
    • MetaCosm 13y ago
      I think we are reaching the golden age of the older developer. Companies are learning how much more great developers are worth than poor ones. Retention bonuses have gone crazy (getting a 3 year / 250k bonus package isn't even that interesting). The evergreen underpinnings, the basic knowledge of how to build systems floats through languages and technologies.
      • timr 13y ago
        Agree with you about the value of older devs, but I wish I could say I saw "the industry" paying for experience. The examples of ridiculous grants I know about have all gone to people who are in their 20s and early 30s. Granted, there's some selection bias going on: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA. That said: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA.
• ams6110 13y ago
  On the internet, nobody has to know how old you are. Or at least this was the case, before people started posting every personal detail of themselves online.
• 3327 13y ago
  SLAPs OP in the face come to your senses man! Old is wise harness your skills to develop new ones. The dodo that can not fly shall go extinct no matter what the profession.
• losethos 13y ago
  http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/Lectures/64BitAsmQuiz.html http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/Lectures/64BitAsmQuiz.html I wrote a 64-bit assembler and compiler. Lots of people know 16-bit. Nobody knows 64-bit. God says... shonest banished ON cause digits Shut Who Angels sovereign tosses because_I_said_so awesome project Ambrose fine lastly pwned Replacement searched suck
• jiggy2011 13y ago
  The hard thing is "keeping your skills current". Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer. The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older. There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything. I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"
• gavanwoolery 13y ago
  "Engineer" is a fairly vague term. Once you are 60, you have probably "graduated" to a higher-level engineering job that involves more consulting/management/planning and less gruntwork. If you still enjoy the gruntwork aspect (I do, at times), more power to you. Either way, anyone involved in a programming-related job should always keep themselves up to date by getting their hands dirty once in a while.
• MetaCosm 13y ago
  """When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly.""" Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?
  • cpeterso 13y ago
    Why does Google still care about people's undergraduate GPAs from 25 years ago? When my friend interviewed at Google (they did hire him), the recruiter wanted to know how many hours per week he worked (to pay his tuition) at university 25 years ago to account for his "low" undergraduate GPA (3.0 - 3.5).
    • yuliyp 13y ago
      That recruiter is bad at their job, then.
    • VLM 13y ago
      Grade inflation = stealth ageism. You can guess my approximate age by knowing that my high school GPA was around 3.5 and that was considered pretty good, but not near valedictorian level. However, in the 2010s you can get a 3.5 just for attendance so you can tell I'm older. I'm so old that the highest grade point I could earn in a class was 4 points, I guess now a days an A+ in a AP class gets you 6 points now or something like that in modern high schools.
    • gems 13y ago
      What would happen if you didn't remember your gpa? It is shocking that they would ask something like that though.
      • jrockway 13y ago
        I see a lot of people put their GPA from 25 years ago on their resume. I didn't put mine on my resume and nobody has ever asked about it.
• DavidAdams 13y ago
  I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground. That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people. In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely. I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.
  • pvnick 13y ago
    >portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy You had me until "nudist." Dare I ask?
    • WalterBright 13y ago
      Hopefully he works remotely from home.
      • primelens 13y ago
        The other guy is sixteen - so he better work from home!
    • Cushman 13y ago
      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nudist_on_the_Late_Shift http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nudist_on_the_Late_Shift (...and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley)
• andyl 13y ago
  I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance. ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other (better) alternatives.
  • 300bps 13y ago
    I turn 41 next month and have been a developer for the two decades that I have been in IT. A 50 year old up to date on the latest tools seems to be the rare exception. The rule at my current employer seems to be after hitting 50-55 that they really have their eye set on retirement. Learning a new skillset has such low dividends that they don't believe it is worthwhile. They show up to work right on time at 8 am, they spend an hour getting their coffee, perhaps breakfast from the cafeteria, chatting with coworkers, etc. Then they stare at a mainframe screen full of Cobol code for an hour or two, take a 90 minute lunch, attend a few meetings in between staring at mainframe Cobol code and then leave at 5 on the dot. They spend two weeks on changes like, "Modify program P90182 to set value 82 instead of value 81 in field CONVEXITY", dutifully put in their change request documents and then move on to the next change honestly believing they're earning their inflated salary.
    • andyl 13y ago
      Lots of generalizations there. Change '50 year old' to 'woman' and the thought-police will have your scalp. :-) Yes of course there are lots of clock-punchers out there. We used to call that mentality 'terminate and stay resident'. (maybe only 50+ will get that reference...) I suppose if I was employed by a large company, I might have grown cynical over time. But I'm working on my own stuff and having a lot of fun with it. The tools are so good I can do things that used to take a team to accomplish. And I can execute way better than I could earlier in my career, just by knowing how to shut down distractions and stay focused.
    • opinali 13y ago
      The problem with such people is their managers. It's the same problem of remote work -- don't blame the slackers that only deliver a couple hours of real work per day; blame managers and team leads who are too incompetent to evaluate actual performance, then reward engineers that deliver and get rid of those that don't.
• perlgeek 13y ago
  I've witnessed the exact opposite. My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60. OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer, because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60. Yeah, I realized that I disliked management (the concept) when I realized that managing is, in most cases, just as bad as being managed.
    • greenyoda 13y ago
      And unless you're the CEO, being a manager is both managing and being managed at the same time.
      • michaelochurch 13y ago
        Right. The corporate system seems to be designed to make almost everyone miserable so the people at the bottom want the jobs above them. The problem is that it leads to pernicious and destructive internal competition, not excellence. My philosophy: mentoring, coordination, and very occasional police work (against internal harassment and bad behavior) are the only valuable contributions of management. The rest of it is useless and should go away. It's outdated.
        • mattdeboard 13y ago
          You spend a lot of time -- "a lot" is a pretty big understatement based on your online activity, blog etc. -- thinking and writing about how miserable being employed at companies X and Y made you. I'm really curious why. I've been miserable in a series of jobs before and the last thing I want to do is go back and wallow in it.
• yekko 13y ago
  There is active discrimination against older engineers. I should know, I'm on many interview/screening rounds.
• venomsnake 13y ago
  And engineer in his 60 will be worth his weight in gold just for knowing all the ways a project can fail and all the unknown unknowns that can bite you in the ass. And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under the hood. That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will hire him in a second given the chance.
• codex 13y ago
  TL;DR if you spend 35 years as an engineer, you'll still need to work for a living, but if you spend 35 years as an entrepreneur or VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top.
  • simonbrown 13y ago
    The chances are you won't, since most businesses fail.
  • mwfunk 13y ago
    Yeah, that's not true at all. Lots of people find success as an entrepreneur but they're the exceptions, not the rule. I'm not saying that it's something that people shouldn't attempt, and it certainly has a higher success rate than attempting to be, say, a rock star or a professional athlete, but it is by nature a high risk endeavor.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    if you spend 35 years as a[...] VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top. Fixed that. However, if you have a Stanford degree, you have an inside track on being a funded entrepreneur, so it may be a safer path.
• cletus 13y ago
  This post is touching on two issues that are somewhat related but different: 1. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard; 2. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in favour of twentysomethings. Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years. (1) is a pretty strong driver for everyone having a long term plan to control your own fate, which means working for yourself. That is, if you're not in industry with inbuilt protections (eg teaching). (2) is harder to pin down. On the one hand, there is a certain (un)survivor bias in that many who started as engineers in their 20s are managers or the like by their 40s. So are those who remain in engineering a good sample? Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have. Family, for example. This can reduce the amount of time you spend on self-improvement. This industry almost requires constant learning, reinvention and skill acquisition. Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth? It's often said that a good technical foundation and education means you can pickup any language. This is true but picking up new skills is both a habit and a skill, one that atrophies if left untapped (IMHO). It's also a question of degree. Perl to Python? Not a big gap. Ada to Ruby? Well.... That all being said, there is age discrimination in this industry. I've personally witnessed someone say "I prefer new grads so I can mold them". That's fine and all but if you say that and don't hire a 50 year old programmer that's a good basis for an age discrimination suit because, well, it is age discrimination. So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate. This is known.
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    How well does "move into management at 40" scale? If anything I would have thought there would be more 40-60 year olds in the work force than 20-40 year olds (or at least a close number). So either some of them have to move into management of non technical staff or you end up with a very top heavy management structure. Tech companies seem to prefer a flatter management structure to avoid too much bureaucracy.
• bdcravens 13y ago
  I've seen plenty of developers in their 30's unable to work because they were a one-language pony, and that language was no longer needed in the marketplace.
• Zigurd 13y ago
  The first book I co-authored on Android programming is already so obsolete it is in O'Reilly's repository of free downloads - the back list of the back list. SICP, which, when it was published, summed up a lot of what I had learned as an undergrad. Nobody reads it to write a mobile app. Since I read it, I had jobs or book contracts that depended on knowledge of LISP machines, bit slice, the original Macintosh OS, Windows telephony API, edge routers, core routers trying to be edge routers, J2ME, Linux on ARM, and Android. Android will be around another 10 years, maybe a bit more or less, and it too will be a museum piece. My shortest trajectory from zero to Noted Authority and back to zero was when I had a book contract to write about Visual J++. Thank you, Sun's lawyers, for that short trip. All that said, if you don't know anything about project management tools, estimating market size, or how to write, or critique, a cash flow and P&L projection, your knowledge is going to be hard to package in a form that has high value.
• bengrunfeld 13y ago
  If you think being an old engineer is tough, try being a new one.
  • acchow 13y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? I am a fairly new developer and haven't found it particularly difficult.
    • bengrunfeld 13y ago
      It's easy if you have 4 years of school to soak up knowledge. But if your family can't afford to pay your school fees, you end up working somewhere full-time. So you have to study nights. Except you fall in love and get married to a wonderful woman, but then she wants to spend those nights with you. So then you end up not sleeping and begging her to get a night-job so that you can learn how to install arch linux on a virtual machine. Becoming a software engineer when you have life commitments is tough, and you end up reading programming language books on your iPhone every time you go to take a crap. Believe me, it's hard.
  • allenu 13y ago
    Being a new engineer is easy. You have boundless energy, passion, and time. You can only get better. You're a sponge taking in all new information. As you get older, you have less time and patience for the next new thing that comes along, plus all those things you learned years ago aren't current any more. Plus, people hiring you have a bias that you aren't current on the latest things since you are older.
  • suyash 13y ago
    good point, it's harder if not as hard I'd argue.
• jrockway 13y ago
  So here's what the article says: "I know two or more engineers around the age of 60 that graduated from MIT or Stanford 35 years ago. Of those two or more, at least one has lost his job, and at least one is afraid of losing his job." Here's what the article doesn't say: what field these engineers are in, whether or not they're good at their job, what company they work(ed) for, what they work on, how up-to-date their knowledge is, etc. Maybe there is age discrimination in the engineering field, but you certainly can't infer that from this anecdote.
• csomar 13y ago
  This article starts from a personal experience (with a really small social circle) and generalize to everyone. Worse, it generalizes to "engineering" which has wild and quite different fields. If you have worked on Cobol or Fortran when you were 25 year-old, these things don't exist anymore (or enough to employ these old developers). Otherwise, just put yourself in the place of the recruiter. I guess, except for special fields like Medicine, Law...; in most of the fields this ageism is the same. If you want to have a builder, would you prefer a 65, 20 or 30? Certainly, you'll pick 30. He has more experience than 20 and way more energy than 65.
• tibbon 13y ago
  Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit. At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem. New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as long as you've got something to contribute. Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone immediately awesome. Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.
  • vacri 13y ago
    I'm 40, but I'm not about to tell a 55-year-old what it's like to try and find employment as a 55-year-old. Just saying 'keep yourself current' is missing a lot of the picture.
    • tibbon 13y ago
      I guess I'm looking at it from a hiring perspective. I don't care how old someone is honestly. I just care what they can do and what they contribute to the team. Having a bit of grey hair is probably an asset, since hopefully they've been to this rodeo once or twice and have some good experiences that we don't.
• ShabbyDoo 13y ago
  Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class reunion to be a great networking opportunity. And, of course, my time has a low opportunity cost. Conversely, am I willing to fly across the country for the weekend if I'm working a lot and need to be in the office on Monday morning? Also, those whose lives at age 60 aren't all that fulfilling professionally or otherwise might be more likely to attend a reunion where the could be reminded of better times. [I say this as someone excited to attend my 20 year high school reunion this summer.] A survey of Stanford engineering graduates done by random selection would be much more interesting.
• 10098 13y ago
  This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but reading comments to some other posts on this blog almost made my jaw drop. "The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast, especially NYC. " lolwut
• joejohnson 13y ago
  In what field of engineering is this person trying to find employment?
• mwfunk 13y ago
  I live in SV and am in my early 40s and can only comment on what I've seen firsthand or heard about secondhand. Based on that, I don't really see ageism. I work with people in their 20s, and I work with people in their 60s. It can be harder to find a new job at comparable pay as you get older, but it has a lot more to do with the following: (1) Salary expectations. Somebody works at the same company for 20 years, gets an annual raise that's above the rate of inflation, and has an expectation that if they go someplace else, they're going to get as much or more money. This might happen, but it's not guaranteed. I've worked at companies in other industries where it was common for people to work at those companies for 30+ years, then retire. These companies have different notions as far as annual raises and how generous the perqs and bonuses should be, because they expect people to be around for a long time. Tech companies tend to be a lot more generous, because there are much higher turnover rates and they have to work harder to retain talent. The result is that after 10 or 20 years at a tech company, you may become accustomed to getting paid above your market value (I hope to have that problem someday :). This isn't always the case, but it does happen. (2) Lack of relevant technical minutiae. Everybody loves to say things like, "it doesn't matter what you know, it's your capacity to learn!" Or, "my knowledge of abstract CS concepts means I can pick up the technical minutiae associated with a learning a new language/library/platform/etc. in no time!" All of these things are true to an extent, and you're not going to get very far without them. However, none of them have anything to do with actually accomplishing anything- they're all just modifiers to your ability to learn and adapt, prior to accomplishing anything. Unfortunately, accomplishing anything requires technical minutiae. Some of it is more widely applicable stuff like programming in a particular language or using certain tools, but the stuff that makes you really really valuable to your current employer is more likely to be the niche that you carve out for yourself over the years. This means, knowledge of specific codebases, and domain-specific knowledge, some of which might be from other disciplines like math or finance or electrical engineering. When you go someplace new, your niche knowledge is either going to be invaluable (yay!) or meaningless (bummer :( ). Most of the time, it's the latter. So, again, this is a case where through no fault of their own, someone has ended up getting paid a lot of money for doing a great job, by acquiring lots of valuable skills that don't mean much outside of that company and position. (3) Burnout. Sometimes people just get sick of spending so much time around computers after 20 or 30 years (or 5-10!). They lose their enthusiasm and aren't as motivated to keep up to date. If you're burned out on your profession, you will have a harder time finding new work, for any number of reasons. It's unfortunate but it happens to everyone at some point or another, maybe many times throughout their career. Some people find ways to renew their interest and get out of this mindset, some don't. Older people are more susceptible to this because they have more important things in their lives (like family). TLDR: don't get frustrated, try to see things from a prospective employer's point of view in addition to your own POV, and keep your skills sharp and up to date. Don't coast. Stay curious and make sure you're still having fun doing what you do. If you're no longer curious or no longer enjoy it, see if you can come at it from a different angle and rejuvenate your interest. If not, you'd probably be happier taking a left turn in your career anyway, doing something completely different.
• michaelochurch 13y ago
  I see our age discrimination problem as the fundamental sign of us being a defeated tribe. Ageism is one of those horrible traits of management culture (i.e. if you have a younger boss, you're a loser) that we wouldn't face if we had kept our tribal integrity (because "bosses" would be coordinators and mentors, not hierarchical superiors, making age irrelevant.) Good programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-haired badasses. (Ok, old bad programmers are annoying, but so are young bad programmers.) Ageism is a managerland prejudice. What the fuck is that shit doing in our industry? Most of us are intellectual whores: massively overqualified for the work we're assigned to do, but hired because it makes the boss feel important to be able to say things like, "I have four Ivy Leaguers working for me" even when the work could be done by one script-kiddie. Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts. It's perverted. When you're young, it's hard as hell to get a good job but getting a job is easy. But that's exactly when you care about getting the good jobs that will build your career. When you're old and have actual use for the crappy jobs (you need to sustain an income) you can't get them; and if you were sidetracked by taking too many crappy jobs (and that's not hard to have happen) you're not qualified for the good ones either.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • vonmoltke 13y ago
    > Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts. Not only that, but social media will hire the college dropout with an impressive Github portfolio while the cancer research institute will shitcan any resume that doesn't have an MS or PhD on it.
    • michaelochurch 13y ago
      It's really disturbing to realize what has happened to the sciences. The death of the scientific/academic job market is why us smart people hate "business douches" so much; the fuckers shut down all the R&D. Those assholes struck first. (To be fair, plenty of businesspeople do more good for the world than bad and aren't douches. It's the shitty ones that have no better ideas than to cut costs recklessly. The problem is that no one shuts them down.) In the 1970s, there were Bachelor-level science jobs. There was an expectation, of course, that most people would go back for graduate degrees; but it gave people a chance to spend a few years in the field and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives before committing to a graduate program. Those Bachelor-level science jobs still exist. The problem is that they're all filled by PhDs. Even most of this Silicon Valley "innovation" in social media isn't half as interesting as the stuff marketers did in the Mad Men era. M&A replacing R&D is one of the worst social developments around. Who's going to bring back Real Technology? Someone will see the value in doing so, I hope.
• virtualwhys 13y ago
  My stepfather is in this situation, just turned 66 and has told me on several occasions, shit, the writing's on the wall, can't compete with the young guns. Of course, he's been in the business since the punch card days and has a huge amount of experience to draw on; as such, he's miraculously (to me) been able to land guaranteed 60 hour per week gigs (even though he likely only works 30 hours) at $125+ per hour. K-rist, that is a skill in itself, landing high paying telecommute gigs and putting in half the hours you're paid for, the f-er ;-)
• redschell 13y ago
  The blog's author, later in the comments section, doing a great impersonation of my mother (sans the anti-immigrant bit): All of the smartest Americans are going into more lucrative fields like finance, medicine, and law. As much as you think the creme-of-the-crop engineers are getting paid, they aren’t making as much as investment bankers, and even the best computer programmers don’t make as much money as an average surgeon. The market is flooded with mediocre Indians willing to work cheap, and that’s what every IT department wants, cheap labor. It amazes me that people can still say things like this in post-crisis America. As if finance, which is still reeling, isn't already flooded with Indians and Asians with tech backgrounds, as if they aren't in law (horrifying debt, anemic job market) and medicine (even more horrifying debt, massive commitment) as well. Hell, I wonder if the quote here, supposedly from the WSJ comments section, is even real, or if he's just looking to rile people up. Ageism in engineering, especially software engineering, is a real issue worthy of vigorous debate, but I'd like to think there are better pieces we can argue around than this dubious anecdote.
• qwerta 13y ago
  Age discrimination is sometimes even publicly announced. For example European Space Agency has age limit for recruitment 55 years. This applies even to desk based jobs such as administrative or software developement. Extract from job description: - The European Space Agency is an equal opportunity employer - Contracts Officer in the Procurement Department, Directorate of Procurement, Financial Operations and Legal Affairs - preparing requests for offers/invitations to tender; - dealing with administrative, contractual, legal and industrial problems arising from the procurements concerned. - Under ESA Regulations, the age limit for recruitment is 55. More at: http://www.esa.int/hr/PDF/ESA-VN-ESTEC-2012-091,REV.1.pdf http://www.esa.int/hr/PDF/ESA-VN-ESTEC-2012-091,REV.1.pdf
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    That seems odd, I can't find anything explaining why such an age limit is in place. I am assuming that there is some reason for it. I know that the military often has an upper age limit due to fitness requirements.
• breakupapp 13y ago
  So what's a good backup plan as you age?
  • pvdm 13y ago
    Read Mr Money Moustache's blog. Live like a grad student even when you are earning six figures.
• xtc 13y ago
  "You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
• ctrager 13y ago
  One datapoint from Chicago: Got laid off at age 56 last year and had two offers within two weeks. But I interviewed at several other places without receiving an offer whereas in the past I almost always got an offer if I got an interview (Google excepted). Here is some speculation about why my batting average dropped. I do feel that age worked against me but I don't think it was because of the companies having institutional biases against hiring older people. Rather, I think it was just the mindsets of individual 20-something/30-something interviewers making individual decisions based on what felt comfortable, based on the vibe feeling ok. Nobody here is doing anything wrong.
• JoeKM 13y ago
  Newton's First Law of Motion. Keep moving, stay moving. Keep eating healthy and exercising, stay healthy and fit. Keep learning, stay sharp and knowledgeable. There are more life frictions as we age that dissuade us from continually learning. If you realize this and work against it, there is no way someone significantly younger than you can realistically be a better fit for a job. They may have knowledge, but you'll have that and decades more experience and wisdom.
• aaron695 13y ago
  Any blog starting with a immigrates take our jobs implication is not really something to note IMO. But anyway if you're an engineer and can't retire by 60 then you've done something wrong. Just don't blow your money on stupid stuff. And by retire at 60, that can mean anything, work for free for a charity, do a simple start up, work part time.
  • bill1996 13y ago
    >"if you're an engineer and can't retire by 60 then you've >done something wrong." I used to think that too....when I was 30&40 something. Life has a funny way of throwing a few curve balls at you that can drain your finances in short order.
• taude 13y ago
  No one's really mentioned that keep up to date or learn a new skill is great advice...but it sucks when someone's tells you that you only have six months with MongoDB and Node.Js, so we only want to pay you for a Junior position. This is where the ageism comes into play, where a young 22 year old who doesn't have the experience because of a new technology buzzword looks attractive to the hiring manager. Seen this move a lot. "But what about all my experience with I/O Completion Ports and multi-threaded server development mastering mutexes and slinging semaphores!?
• astrofinch 13y ago
  Here's his follow up post that responds to comments in this thread: http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/follow-up-on-old-engineers/ http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/follow-...