3 ms·

because unless you can work 40 hours a week and spend another 20 learning new techs as they come out for the entirety of your life, you will become obsolete unl

by autokad 13y ago

because unless you can work 40 hours a week and spend another 20 learning new techs as they come out for the entirety of your life, you will become obsolete unless you can move onto other roles. If management is not an option, then chances are very likely that person will be unemployable somewhere between ages 40-50. and that's only one problem. you may reach (or ever want to) the top, but if there is a low ceiling that is going to put so many pressures on your career.

smsm42 13y ago
"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any time soon. The time where experience from 10 years ago was completely irrelevant is past, now you could have been writing in Java 10 years ago and still be doing it today and continue doing it 10 years from now if you'd like so. Of course, you have to keep current, but any trade has that, especially trade which deals with advanced technologies.
- autokad 13y ago
  you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states. and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. The 'hard' stuff is paying more and more and requires less and less people to do it, while the easy stuff is consistently either being outsourced or made so easy 'anyone' can do it. and unemployed beyond 40 dead in the industry? are you kidding me? we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Where do you think those people went, they just up and died? they had to pick a new industry
  - smsm42 13y ago
    You quite underestimate the number of COBOL jobs. E.g. simple search [1] reveals thousands of COBOL jobs just on one site, and most of these jobs I imagine would not be even advertised on generic job-search sites since these go through consulting firms which already know who they can hire. Deeper research shows there are millions of COBOL programmers now [2] and massive numbers of COBOL applications still in business. Actually, as traditional COBOL programmers start retiring and banks and hedge funds still being in business, programming COBOL may become very very lucrative market, paying very much better than your average Ruby or Java gig. >>> newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. I see no indication of this. Actually, most of the things that were with us 10 years ago are still around, and introduction of paradigm-shifting concepts massively slowed down due to massive size of the market which would not allow quick change and incurs massive legacy costs. You could maybe introduce new HTML version in a year in the 90s, but now you're stuck with HTML 4 for decades because literally millions of applications depend on it and they are not going to change, and HTML 5 is rolling out in baby steps, despite all the cool stuff it proposes. Looks what happens to XP - they have a massive install base and now Microsoft can not get rid of it, however hard it tries. Market size is enormous now, and so the pace of adoption of any paradigm-shifting concepts is much slower than before. >>> we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Could you back this up with some data? I haven't found the data that support this conclusion. The programming jobs are shifting around and moving, but I don't see IT being smaller now that it is in the 90s, even accounting for the dotcom bust. Where is that "less programming jobs" coming from? [1] http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html [2] http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol Edit: removed wrong data.
    - autokad 13y ago
      yes there are a few COBOL 'jobs' scattered throughout the country, but that really doesnt matter. a person can stick with learning one language and hoping it remains relevant for their 40-50 year career, but outliers do not make a rule. theres lots of people doing really well playing the lottery. making a web page today in 'html' is NOTHING like it was 5 years ago, let alone 10. you're simplifying it way too much. if you were a web designer, and just stuck with what you taught yourself back in 2005, you would be out of a job. you constantly have to learn new libraries, new languages because no software operates on an island. yes, every field must adapt and add changes, but none so much as like with tech. all of this is COMPLETELY irreverent anyways. IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS. And if you think people will still find your skills valuable even though you don't plan on updating them constantly, good luck. the point is, if you read the article and dont want to gamble with your future, a programmer is a dead end job in the sense that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.

by autokad 13y ago

smsm42 13y ago

"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any time soon. The time where experience from 10 years ago was completely irrelevant is past, now you could have been writing in Java 10 years ago and still be doing it today and continue doing it 10 years from now if you'd like so. Of course, you have to keep current, but any trade has that, especially trade which deals with advanced technologies.

autokad 13y ago
you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states. and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. The 'hard' stuff is paying more and more and requires less and less people to do it, while the easy stuff is consistently either being outsourced or made so easy 'anyone' can do it. and unemployed beyond 40 dead in the industry? are you kidding me? we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Where do you think those people went, they just up and died? they had to pick a new industry
- smsm42 13y ago
  You quite underestimate the number of COBOL jobs. E.g. simple search [1] reveals thousands of COBOL jobs just on one site, and most of these jobs I imagine would not be even advertised on generic job-search sites since these go through consulting firms which already know who they can hire. Deeper research shows there are millions of COBOL programmers now [2] and massive numbers of COBOL applications still in business. Actually, as traditional COBOL programmers start retiring and banks and hedge funds still being in business, programming COBOL may become very very lucrative market, paying very much better than your average Ruby or Java gig. >>> newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. I see no indication of this. Actually, most of the things that were with us 10 years ago are still around, and introduction of paradigm-shifting concepts massively slowed down due to massive size of the market which would not allow quick change and incurs massive legacy costs. You could maybe introduce new HTML version in a year in the 90s, but now you're stuck with HTML 4 for decades because literally millions of applications depend on it and they are not going to change, and HTML 5 is rolling out in baby steps, despite all the cool stuff it proposes. Looks what happens to XP - they have a massive install base and now Microsoft can not get rid of it, however hard it tries. Market size is enormous now, and so the pace of adoption of any paradigm-shifting concepts is much slower than before. >>> we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Could you back this up with some data? I haven't found the data that support this conclusion. The programming jobs are shifting around and moving, but I don't see IT being smaller now that it is in the 90s, even accounting for the dotcom bust. Where is that "less programming jobs" coming from? [1] http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html [2] http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol Edit: removed wrong data.
  - autokad 13y ago
    yes there are a few COBOL 'jobs' scattered throughout the country, but that really doesnt matter. a person can stick with learning one language and hoping it remains relevant for their 40-50 year career, but outliers do not make a rule. theres lots of people doing really well playing the lottery. making a web page today in 'html' is NOTHING like it was 5 years ago, let alone 10. you're simplifying it way too much. if you were a web designer, and just stuck with what you taught yourself back in 2005, you would be out of a job. you constantly have to learn new libraries, new languages because no software operates on an island. yes, every field must adapt and add changes, but none so much as like with tech. all of this is COMPLETELY irreverent anyways. IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS. And if you think people will still find your skills valuable even though you don't plan on updating them constantly, good luck. the point is, if you read the article and dont want to gamble with your future, a programmer is a dead end job in the sense that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.