8 ms·

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)

by 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - mason55 13y ago
    I think you have a pretty bad view of managers. There are plenty of management positions that are a) necessary, b) challenging, and c) very technical. "Moving to management" doesn't mean you suddenly just create Powerpoints all day. If you're a good technical manager you can suddenly use your skills to multiply your contributions far beyond what you'd be able to do as a single person. Let's start with the common premise that a good programmer is 10x better than a bad one. A good first level manager, who has 10 reports, could effect a difference of 100x. And a good senior manager, who has 10 midlevel reports, could effect a multiplier of 1000x.
    - fancyketchup 13y ago
      It's not the view of managers, it's a view of the numbers. If approximately half the workforce is between 40 and 60 and half is between 20 and 40, then half your staff are managers. That would work if only two people report to each manager (branching factor of 2), but it seems very inefficient to have so many levels of management: log_2(#staff). On the other hand, with a branching factor of 10 only 1/9th of your workforce are managers, so management positions only support those between 55 and 60. The point of the original comment was that you can't have "move into management" as the default career track for people in their 40's. There just aren't enough management positions.
      - mason55 13y ago
        > The point of the original comment was that you can't have "move into management" as the default career track for people in their 40's. There just aren't enough management positions. Totally agree. The thing is that that applies not only management but to senior development positions as well. Most firms have no need for a workforce that's 100%, 80% or 60% senior devs. There is a LOT of grunt development that needs to be done and the older you are the more money you're going to want. We can call them managers, senior devs, whatever, but the truth is that there's not enough room for everyone to constantly be moving up and making more money. Engineers have created a very egalitarian workforce and in most cases it's great but this is one of those cases where it doesn't work. Industries that have been around longer have already figured this out (law, banking, etc) where you have the "up or out" mentality. There's been a lot of work and research done showing how and why this works and how to create the proper balance depending what sort of work you're doing. The more cutting edge work you're doing the more senior devs you need but the lower percentage payout the partners get. It's not a matter of moving people to management or not but a simple fact of we can't all be at the top of a firm and if you're not moving up it's better to replace you with someone younger and cheaper who can do the same thing. Check out the book Managing the Professional Services Firm for more, it's a great read and really applies to software.
samfisher83 13y ago
In an industry like O&G or energy experience is highly valued. When you have you have potentially billions of dollars on the line and many peoples lives with an oil platform you want someone who has done it before. In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer.
- Angostura 13y ago
  > In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer. Alternatively, choose the older engineer with the experience to know: "You know what? Fundamentally, what we're building here is the same as this thing from 10 years ago".
  - samfisher83 13y ago
    Yes everything seems to go full circle from mainframe to PC to the cloud (Mainframes). It may be the same problem but someone younger might know how to tailor that solution to the younger generation. The other thing is all these founders are so young they may lack the experience or maturity to hire an older person.
    - samfisher1906 13y ago
      I work at a software company that most likely will be bankrupt by year end due to a young developer's desire to rewrite our flagship product from the ground up using "new" technology. Three years later this new product has 40% of the functionality of the pervious version and has customers canceling contracts that have been with us for 10+ years.
  - disbelief 13y ago
    Exactly. Just because you're trying to accomplish something "no one has done yet" doesn't mean that you aren't going to be building on top of things (software, frameworks, paradigms) that have been around, at scale, for years. The older engineer is more likely to realize when a problem has already been solved, or during a crisis can connect the dots from previous experiences to find the solution.
qxf2 13y ago
>>"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." Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
"Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have." Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomenon. "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?" No. Is it an example of racism if you didn't want to hire a drug trafficking nigerian scammer and pedophile as a baby sitter for your 5 year old daughter? The idea that these are even relevant examples is ageism or racism. I don't know a single 45 year old software engineer who knows Ada, Cobol and Forth. They didn't serve in Vietnam either. Everyone knows they have to be up-to-date with current technologies and it becomes easier with age because many changes are very superficial to the point of being trivial.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Your last sentence is spot on. There is not that much challenge in picking up Python or Ruby if you are an accomplished C or Perl programmer.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    While I agree, I'd go further and say the issue is not language as much as it is ecosystem. The ecosystems are changing more rapidly than they were 20 years ago. Or, at least, we learn about more of these changes faster than we did. Ruby is Ruby, but do you use webrick? mongrel? thin? unicorn? passenger? Whoops! You chose what?! everyone knows that hasn't been supported for 6 months when the guy writing it quit supporting it because someone insulted him on a mailing list! The stuff around a language is generally what changes more often than the language, and keeping up can be a challenge, regardless of age.
- cafard 13y ago
  When your kids move out--which is likely to be when you are in your mid-40s to mid-50s--then your non-work priorities are going diminish some. For that matter, when the youngest kid gets a drivers license this starts to happen.
WalterBright 13y ago
> 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? Um, I'm 54 and the languages of my 20's were C, C++, etc. I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters. > 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. Or, you can be a driver of this change yourself by developing a modern, advanced programming language.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Java is nearly 20 years old. Do people really think if you're 45 you worked in Cobol?
  - Jare 13y ago
    I'm 42 and I did, working part-time at a bank during college. For 3 days, at least. Then I designed a DSL and wrote a C tool to generate the COBOL programs from templates and DSL files. Then my boss decided to never again let me near the mainframe and bank accounting systems. But many of my coworkers spent 3+ years entirely on COBOL.
  - nikatwork 13y ago
    I work in finance. We are teaching plenty of fresh-faced graduate recruit devs COBOL.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      For someone into retrocomputing (who even made a 327x-ish terminal font), being paid to learn COBOL is weirdly interesting.
      - nikatwork 13y ago
        Most of the org's original COBOL programmers are retirement age. So there's 60yo greybeards teaching COBOL to 20yos. It's a weird time to be a mainframer. If you are an experienced specialist you can charge insane hourly rates. At the same time, some bigger orgs have started transitioning off the old stack because all the experts keep dying or retiring. At some point mainframe specialist skills will go from insanely valuable to completely worthless.
larrys 13y ago
HN is off to the races here! This entire thread is based on the following: "I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article:" So in other words somebody made a comment. A comment! Not a WSJ story even, or a story in a b newspaper or, but a blog comment. Add: I mean if someone had posed an "Ask HN" question and everybody gives their thoughts (anecdotal or otherwise) that's fine. But this??? Add: With the resulting suggestion, once again based on a blog comment taken as being true, authentic, researched and validated: "Do your future self a favor, find another occupation."
PostOnce 13y ago
If you don't hire someone because they know Ada instead of Ruby, the odds that you're profoundly shortsighted are extremely high. I once worked at a startup whose cofounders told me that I was the oldest person in the office (having just turned 26) because "people over 30 don't get technology", meanwhile, they couldn't understand HTML, much less programming, and therefore had to hire me. The very best programmer I know works primarily in Ada at his day job, whereas I know all the trendy web fads. If I had to choose him or me as an employee to write code, regardless of language, I'd choose him, objectively. If he starts working on whatever I'm working on, he'd almost certainly be better at it than me in a week. Whenever I have a difficult programming problem, I can struggle with it for hours (or days), and he can make it clear in minutes. He can look at my code in a language he's never seen before, for example, and solve my problem. It seems like a lot of companies are in the habit of hiring resumes instead of people. The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things. Some of the seemingly widespread opinions in this industry (or at least among startup scene types) make me wonder how most of you manage not to drown when it rains. Some of the stuff I hear just makes no sense. It's not based in logic. Fortunately for guys like my friend, defense contractors and other huge corporations will be hiring devastatingly skilled people who have "boring, obsolete" skillsets for the foreseeable future. They're probably too smart to work at our on-average-destined-to-fail startups anyway. Contrary to popular belief, computer skills really don't decay that much. "New" things aren't really that new, they're almost always related to or based on something we've seen before, and if you're really any good at what you do, it won't take you long to get a grasp on it. Analogy: If you wouldn't hire Bruce Lee because he doesn't know the latest direct-to-DVD self-defense technique by Generic UFC Guy (TM)... you're making a huge mistake. tl;dr: make snap judgements and you're going to wind up sub-optimal employees.
- kamaal 13y ago
  >>The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things. Unfortunately the older your are, you are less flexible, less adjusting, running short of energy, you can't take risks as you have a family, you can't work too hard or push yourself too much because there are health risks associated with that. The list goes endless. Its not a very comfortable position to be in old age. As some one who is in 20's and watching people in their 40's(My uncles) and my father(in his 60's) I can tell you the only chance we engineers have is to make loads of money, real estate and savings before we are 40-45. Else we are screwed. That unfortunately is the most blunt way to put it. You may believe in whatever you may like about experience coming with old age, but your employers will take raw passion and energy over accumulated experience any day. Your best bet is to make a lot of money and be safe or risk going through a lot of pain when you grow old.
ojbyrne 13y ago
It is an example of ageism to assume that "the older you get in general, the more non-work priorities you have." Basically that is what's implied by the "ism" part - assigning the characteristics that may be present in some members of a group to all members of that group.

by cletus 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- mason55 13y ago
  I think you have a pretty bad view of managers. There are plenty of management positions that are a) necessary, b) challenging, and c) very technical. "Moving to management" doesn't mean you suddenly just create Powerpoints all day. If you're a good technical manager you can suddenly use your skills to multiply your contributions far beyond what you'd be able to do as a single person. Let's start with the common premise that a good programmer is 10x better than a bad one. A good first level manager, who has 10 reports, could effect a difference of 100x. And a good senior manager, who has 10 midlevel reports, could effect a multiplier of 1000x.
  - fancyketchup 13y ago
    It's not the view of managers, it's a view of the numbers. If approximately half the workforce is between 40 and 60 and half is between 20 and 40, then half your staff are managers. That would work if only two people report to each manager (branching factor of 2), but it seems very inefficient to have so many levels of management: log_2(#staff). On the other hand, with a branching factor of 10 only 1/9th of your workforce are managers, so management positions only support those between 55 and 60. The point of the original comment was that you can't have "move into management" as the default career track for people in their 40's. There just aren't enough management positions.
    - mason55 13y ago
      > The point of the original comment was that you can't have "move into management" as the default career track for people in their 40's. There just aren't enough management positions. Totally agree. The thing is that that applies not only management but to senior development positions as well. Most firms have no need for a workforce that's 100%, 80% or 60% senior devs. There is a LOT of grunt development that needs to be done and the older you are the more money you're going to want. We can call them managers, senior devs, whatever, but the truth is that there's not enough room for everyone to constantly be moving up and making more money. Engineers have created a very egalitarian workforce and in most cases it's great but this is one of those cases where it doesn't work. Industries that have been around longer have already figured this out (law, banking, etc) where you have the "up or out" mentality. There's been a lot of work and research done showing how and why this works and how to create the proper balance depending what sort of work you're doing. The more cutting edge work you're doing the more senior devs you need but the lower percentage payout the partners get. It's not a matter of moving people to management or not but a simple fact of we can't all be at the top of a firm and if you're not moving up it's better to replace you with someone younger and cheaper who can do the same thing. Check out the book Managing the Professional Services Firm for more, it's a great read and really applies to software.

samfisher83 13y ago

In an industry like O&G or energy experience is highly valued. When you have you have potentially billions of dollars on the line and many peoples lives with an oil platform you want someone who has done it before. In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer.

Angostura 13y ago
> In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer. Alternatively, choose the older engineer with the experience to know: "You know what? Fundamentally, what we're building here is the same as this thing from 10 years ago".
- samfisher83 13y ago
  Yes everything seems to go full circle from mainframe to PC to the cloud (Mainframes). It may be the same problem but someone younger might know how to tailor that solution to the younger generation. The other thing is all these founders are so young they may lack the experience or maturity to hire an older person.
  - samfisher1906 13y ago
    I work at a software company that most likely will be bankrupt by year end due to a young developer's desire to rewrite our flagship product from the ground up using "new" technology. Three years later this new product has 40% of the functionality of the pervious version and has customers canceling contracts that have been with us for 10+ years.
- disbelief 13y ago
  Exactly. Just because you're trying to accomplish something "no one has done yet" doesn't mean that you aren't going to be building on top of things (software, frameworks, paradigms) that have been around, at scale, for years. The older engineer is more likely to realize when a problem has already been solved, or during a crisis can connect the dots from previous experiences to find the solution.

qxf2 13y ago

>>"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." Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.

fauigerzigerk 13y ago

"Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have." Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomenon. "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?" No. Is it an example of racism if you didn't want to hire a drug trafficking nigerian scammer and pedophile as a baby sitter for your 5 year old daughter? The idea that these are even relevant examples is ageism or racism. I don't know a single 45 year old software engineer who knows Ada, Cobol and Forth. They didn't serve in Vietnam either. Everyone knows they have to be up-to-date with current technologies and it becomes easier with age because many changes are very superficial to the point of being trivial.

ams6110 13y ago
Your last sentence is spot on. There is not that much challenge in picking up Python or Ruby if you are an accomplished C or Perl programmer.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  While I agree, I'd go further and say the issue is not language as much as it is ecosystem. The ecosystems are changing more rapidly than they were 20 years ago. Or, at least, we learn about more of these changes faster than we did. Ruby is Ruby, but do you use webrick? mongrel? thin? unicorn? passenger? Whoops! You chose what?! everyone knows that hasn't been supported for 6 months when the guy writing it quit supporting it because someone insulted him on a mailing list! The stuff around a language is generally what changes more often than the language, and keeping up can be a challenge, regardless of age.
cafard 13y ago
When your kids move out--which is likely to be when you are in your mid-40s to mid-50s--then your non-work priorities are going diminish some. For that matter, when the youngest kid gets a drivers license this starts to happen.

WalterBright 13y ago

> 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? Um, I'm 54 and the languages of my 20's were C, C++, etc. I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters. > 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. Or, you can be a driver of this change yourself by developing a modern, advanced programming language.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
Java is nearly 20 years old. Do people really think if you're 45 you worked in Cobol?
- Jare 13y ago
  I'm 42 and I did, working part-time at a bank during college. For 3 days, at least. Then I designed a DSL and wrote a C tool to generate the COBOL programs from templates and DSL files. Then my boss decided to never again let me near the mainframe and bank accounting systems. But many of my coworkers spent 3+ years entirely on COBOL.
- nikatwork 13y ago
  I work in finance. We are teaching plenty of fresh-faced graduate recruit devs COBOL.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    For someone into retrocomputing (who even made a 327x-ish terminal font), being paid to learn COBOL is weirdly interesting.
    - nikatwork 13y ago
      Most of the org's original COBOL programmers are retirement age. So there's 60yo greybeards teaching COBOL to 20yos. It's a weird time to be a mainframer. If you are an experienced specialist you can charge insane hourly rates. At the same time, some bigger orgs have started transitioning off the old stack because all the experts keep dying or retiring. At some point mainframe specialist skills will go from insanely valuable to completely worthless.

larrys 13y ago

HN is off to the races here! This entire thread is based on the following: "I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article:" So in other words somebody made a comment. A comment! Not a WSJ story even, or a story in a b newspaper or, but a blog comment. Add: I mean if someone had posed an "Ask HN" question and everybody gives their thoughts (anecdotal or otherwise) that's fine. But this??? Add: With the resulting suggestion, once again based on a blog comment taken as being true, authentic, researched and validated: "Do your future self a favor, find another occupation."

PostOnce 13y ago

If you don't hire someone because they know Ada instead of Ruby, the odds that you're profoundly shortsighted are extremely high. I once worked at a startup whose cofounders told me that I was the oldest person in the office (having just turned 26) because "people over 30 don't get technology", meanwhile, they couldn't understand HTML, much less programming, and therefore had to hire me. The very best programmer I know works primarily in Ada at his day job, whereas I know all the trendy web fads. If I had to choose him or me as an employee to write code, regardless of language, I'd choose him, objectively. If he starts working on whatever I'm working on, he'd almost certainly be better at it than me in a week. Whenever I have a difficult programming problem, I can struggle with it for hours (or days), and he can make it clear in minutes. He can look at my code in a language he's never seen before, for example, and solve my problem. It seems like a lot of companies are in the habit of hiring resumes instead of people. The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things. Some of the seemingly widespread opinions in this industry (or at least among startup scene types) make me wonder how most of you manage not to drown when it rains. Some of the stuff I hear just makes no sense. It's not based in logic. Fortunately for guys like my friend, defense contractors and other huge corporations will be hiring devastatingly skilled people who have "boring, obsolete" skillsets for the foreseeable future. They're probably too smart to work at our on-average-destined-to-fail startups anyway. Contrary to popular belief, computer skills really don't decay that much. "New" things aren't really that new, they're almost always related to or based on something we've seen before, and if you're really any good at what you do, it won't take you long to get a grasp on it. Analogy: If you wouldn't hire Bruce Lee because he doesn't know the latest direct-to-DVD self-defense technique by Generic UFC Guy (TM)... you're making a huge mistake. tl;dr: make snap judgements and you're going to wind up sub-optimal employees.

kamaal 13y ago
>>The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things. Unfortunately the older your are, you are less flexible, less adjusting, running short of energy, you can't take risks as you have a family, you can't work too hard or push yourself too much because there are health risks associated with that. The list goes endless. Its not a very comfortable position to be in old age. As some one who is in 20's and watching people in their 40's(My uncles) and my father(in his 60's) I can tell you the only chance we engineers have is to make loads of money, real estate and savings before we are 40-45. Else we are screwed. That unfortunately is the most blunt way to put it. You may believe in whatever you may like about experience coming with old age, but your employers will take raw passion and energy over accumulated experience any day. Your best bet is to make a lot of money and be safe or risk going through a lot of pain when you grow old.

ojbyrne 13y ago

It is an example of ageism to assume that "the older you get in general, the more non-work priorities you have." Basically that is what's implied by the "ism" part - assigning the characteristics that may be present in some members of a group to all members of that group.