Job Chances for Older Coders? 581
emtboy9 asks: "As the semester winds to a close, exams fall upon us students once again. Today, outside of one of my programming classes, I overheard a conversation between a pair of middle aged women about programming degrees (which they are involved in), and this made me wonder. With the job market in IT being as pathetic as it is, what are the real-world chances of someone who is taking a programming course getting a job. In the places I have worked, all the coders were fairly young. So the question is, what are the chances for an older person, who is just now learning programming to get a job in that field?" Ask Slashdot last touched on this topic back in February of 2001. In the intervening two years, have things gotten worse or better for those who have been in the industry for a long time?
"With the increasing popularity in such places, tech and trade schools and even colleges and universities are spitting out MCSEs, CCNAs, A+, Net+, etc certified techs, as well as people of all ages (one person in my VB class is nearly 60) who are trained to write code.
With that in mind, I guess I thought I would throw that out to the Slashdot crowd to see what kind of experiences they have either as a middle aged person entering the IT workforce for the first time, or as a younger tech, or even a manager, faced with either working with, or hiring someone who is from a completely different generation."
Young minds absorb quicker (Score:2, Insightful)
A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.
Why young coders suck (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, flamebait, I know. You are probably in your twenties...
Two cents... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why you see so many corporations, and smaller companies too, with interned developers, and why it's so common to hear, especially in the IT world, of rounds of layoffs followed by hiring fresh new faces from India or someplace.
The truth of the matter is that enthusiasm about programming, and computers in general, is what a lot of people should be looking for. It's very easy to keep on top of the newest technologies when doing so is a hobby rather than a once-a-week training seminar. One enthusiastic programmer can easily do more than an entire group of slack-jawed code monkeys with no real desire to do what they're doing.
Younger programmers might get hired more quickly, but they also run the risk of getting laid off pretty fast, too, if they pick the wrong place to get a job.
Re: Older Coders (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Joined the Support section (let's face it, anyone can make it in there without a degree)
2. After a few years in support, he'd made enough contacts, that he was able to get an interview in the programming section, and successfully got a position.
I really cannot see any other way, for an "older" IT person to get such a job, there is simply NO WAY that someone over say 40 will be hired as a coder straight up, unless they have very specific skills that are required by the employer.
At least you didn't pick screenwriting (Score:5, Insightful)
Young emploees will work for less pay. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:1, Insightful)
SIlly question (Score:4, Insightful)
With jobs opening up in places like Mexico and India where the labor force is cheap and educated, the American code monkey doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. What you need to do is move on to more specialized fields, like MechE or EE. Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety, so those fields certainly won't be going away any time soon. On the other hand, those of you managing "Linux boxen" are quite replaceable.
MOD THIS UP (Score:5, Insightful)
30 is young! (Score:3, Insightful)
In such professions you generally complete your degrees in your mid twenties (that is if you are fortunate enough to have rich parents). Then you start clawing your way up the ladder.
My experience is that the best programmers and designers are in their mid thirties. But the computer programmer industry is known for chewing up people and spitting out useless husks.
As for the computer industry right now. Your chances of getting a job right out of college is pretty low. Your chances for getting a job with a few years of experience is pretty low, and your chance of getting a job when you are past 40 is basically nil.
Show me the money!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, as the "way back link" shows people buy experience or "hot tech". They buy it cheap because most of it is learned by students or people fairly young. They are always exceptions, but they are exceptions.
If you are 40+ you are going to have a hard time switching positions, unless you know a hot tech. The fact is you want more money than the developer who is 24. You believe your experience brings value and to some extent it does, but...how much? With CS grads coming out of college, glad to make 26k a year, can you take such a job? Can you afford a 10k pay cut?
What I found is people will not let you take a pay cut because they fear you would leave for better money, but they will not hire you for better money, because they could hire someone 24, for 40% of what you make now. So I see more stay with companies, waiting to retire, or go into consulting.
Re:Why young coders suck (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nobody more annoying to work with or argue with than a CS purist -- someone who doesn't care about CPU utilization or memory limits or disk space, has his flashy new computer paid for by mommy and daddy, the type of idiot who will suggest massively complex general-purpose algorithms for tiny problem instances... just the insistence that there's one perfect way to solve any problem pisses me off.
The number one thing I look for in employees is flexibility -- if a coder can tell me a good anecdote about porting a massive C++ program back down to C, or tell horror stories about their time doing IT support, or talk about functional languages over beer, I'm going to value them a LOT more than someone who can code well in a pinch but is impossible to work with.
Attention, coders still in college: Figure out how many hours per week you spend in your dorm room in front of the computer. If it's more than 35, then you have a problem. Go out and have dinner with your friends, get drunk, hit on girls, get some sun. The only thing that's more valuable to your career than solid coding skills is solid people skills -- knowing how to talk to average people, to your colleagues, and to your potential clients without coming across as clueless or pompous (or both). If I can't trust you to talk about our technology to a client at a meeting, I don't want you.
Old age and treachery (Score:2, Insightful)
My Experiences... (Score:2, Insightful)
These are just my experiences as a recent grad.
-Jon
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of an old coder as of an old chair. What is the difference between an old chair in an antique store and an old chair in a thrift store? None, except the price! Well, one might have been used by Elvis, while the other was not - but who cares it's the same old piece of junk. One got lucky (Elvis sat on it); the other did not. Tough luck. Same with us. You might be lucky because you are working with systems that will exist for the next 40 years. And I, with all my C/C++ coding skills, will become a dinosaur in less than a decade. Or maybe the other way around. We never know who will get lucky, and who won't. Just like the chairs.
Re:Been there...done that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why young coders suck (Score:2, Insightful)
Flexibility is the key. You're not always going to get your idea across (in fact, you may have to restrain yourself from saying "I told you so..." later on.)
The problem with younger folk is that they tend to be VERY idealistic. I know, I've been there, done that. Unfortunately, we all find out the world isn't all black and white (although that doesn't mean that you should sacrifice your morals or ethics!) But there are more than 256 shades of grey.
Life is more important than a computer.
Chris
Re:Been there...done that (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Been there...done that (Score:2, Insightful)
It ain't cuz they're geniuses... (Score:5, Insightful)
- they'll accept lower compensation, and
- you can work them harder
Older coders are much more likely to have families, children, and (dare we say it?) lives than fresh cannon-fodder from the universities. They're going to want to spend the weekend helping the wife paint the nursery, and they're going to want to go home before somebody yells at them because dinner's cold. They're also going to raise more of a stink when the pointy-haired boss decides to cut corners on the healthcare policy yet again, and they're more likely to notice that company-wide salary freeze plus ever-decreasing benefits equals less compensation every year. They might be wise enough to realize that those paper stock options aren't going to mean as much as, say, money. Et cetera.Age Not The Issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you point out how your age means you've got experience to bring to the fore and, most of all, you've learned to deal with issues maturely. One of the main problems in a lot of "younger" software companies is that all the early 20s coders think it's an entitlement and get in to rages at every bit of stupidity, bad mouthing people, talking about how the company sucks, moving on etc.
Once you've been around, you realise every company has its compliment of bad managers etc. and even that sometimes those bad managers are actually perfectly good managers, you personally just happen not to have the full picture. You work well anyway, rather than complaining. That's a huge bonus to an employer.
The question is, and one I find myself asking as I get older, do you want to put up with the same crap the younger coders do? Or do older coders fit the stereotype because, funnily enough, as you get older, you learn more and realise coding can be a sucky lifestyle?
That $50,000 job is great for a single guy but suddenly it's not so great for someone with a house and kids.
Those long hours just before a release are fine for someone who just has to go back to an empty room but a major issue when you have to pick the kids up, take them to ballet and then put them to bed.
The sudden change of deadlines that mean you're working over the weekend and you're not told until Friday afternoon don't give the flexability you need for family.
Having a conference during the school holidays that the company HAS to have a demo ready for becomes an issue if it's the only time your kids can go on holiday with you.
Maternity leave? Sure, it's a protected right. You still expect to be getting the same promotions as the guy who isn't six months behind on the latest technologies?
Your wrists starting to ache? The young coders can burn through five years before their carpal tunnel syndrome gets really bad. Now you're older and know how much pain it can cause, are you prepared to burn your body up like they are?
Coding is a high paying lifestyle. It's also a pretty abusive one to your body and your family life over the long term. Most older people aren't prepared to put up with that once they're old enough to realise. Most younger guys are too stupid to realise. Knowing what it entails, if you're prepared to put up with it anyway, there's still work.
I'm convinced (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead it is an "art" and you either have the gift to program and truely zone out and become the code, or you don't.
Age means nothing as long as their is that real talent to know how to follow code and feel your way through every loop and line.
The only real big hurdle is actual experience. And younger coders and older people new to the "art" of programming will all face this. Yet I believe it's an easier hurdle for older people since they do tend to at least have real work experience usually lacked by the younger programmers.
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:1, Insightful)
1) To say that open-mindedness and flexibility disappear around the age of 30-35 is a comment that must come from someone younger than that bracket (i.e. don't know what they are talking about), or someone in the bracket or older that didn't realize their dreams and is bitter.
There are innumerable innovations that have come from geezers older than 35. In fact, I would dare to say that the vast majority of innovation comes from persons over the age of 35 (but don't have time to write the doctoral thesis which would prove this). As a quick example, Marcel Proust, who can be considered revolutionary in literature, began on "Remembrance of Things Past" at the Methuselian age of 38.
2) Coders are not, by definition, creative. In fact, the vast majority of coders are just implementing ideas that someone else had. I like the analogy I read somewhere that coders will end up in the same category as plumbers in a decade or two when we look back. Important and useful - yes. Revolutionary - no.
Re:Young minds absorb quicker (Score:4, Insightful)
A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.
Oh please. Anyone who is capable of earning a University degree, old or young, is quite clearly capable of learning... after all, at least when I went through Uni, we had to learn to get the damn degree in the first place! What you describe is just a prejudice... the "old dogs can't learn new tricks" mentality which is, unfortunately, prevalent in our society.
I*M*HO, there is no specific reason to assume older people make poorer techies. In fact, the manager I work for is in his late forties, and he's probably one of the smartest men I've come across. He's constantly learning new things... hell, he seems to have an easier time keeping up with trends than I do!
I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.
Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.
Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".
But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [barnesandnoble.com] Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online [sierra.com] felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".
Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.
University of Life stands for very little in I.T. (Score:5, Insightful)
What few of these poor schmucks are told or realise is that different languages are basically just a change of syntax (plus some relatively minor technique changes) and therefore easy to pick up if you already have the grounding. It's the underlying design and analysis skills (the ones you can't really teach) plus straight-forward experience that people are looking for in the more mature developers.
If an employer wants inexperienced developers, the newbie graduate will be be favoured as they will have lower salary expectations. If they are looking to the more mature person, it's because they are looking for the I.T. skills and not the "life" experience.
My current employer just sent round some c.v's for us to comment on for a work experience (read: unpaid) position we have - God, I hate doing that - and half of them were "mature" people moving from other industries which have slackened off. You try to ignore that you are potentially consigning the unchosen to failure and potential unemployment, thinking "there but for the grace of God go I". You look at the scant overview of I.T. skills that their three/six month "training" course has given them and know that most haven't got a chance - they've been sold a fantasy by the training agency.
The fact is that I.T. is a young person's industry, be it due to misconceptions or not, and unless you get in early it will be very hard to make it stick. We all know how rapidly the technology changes and how hard it can be to keep up; when you have a house and family there's even less time available - I've learnt to read and walk (without bumping into things/people) just so I can use the train/walk to work to read manuals - it's only my long experience, adaptability and up-to-date skills that have seen me through these last few years of lean times.
If you can show the ability to adapt, have plenty of hands-on and can keep up then contracting is the way to go for the older developer IMHO. Employers don't want to take on permanent oldies (like me, shit I'm only 41!) but the contract industry cares less about the person and looks more for the right skill-set and the experience to back it up. It's kept me in good money thus far but I have to admit it's getting harder to keep up all the time.
It depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
At my company (if we were hiring), we'd only hire experienced programmers (including former interns) right now. "Just out of school" with no practical experience wouldn't be considered. This is a product of both the current state of the company and the local hiring market; we're very short-term focused currently and there's a glut of good people in our local market - I personally know over a dozen good programmers who've been job-hunting in the last 3 months. If we hire, we're going to cherry-pick.
However, some other factors that will influence the ability of a new coder to land a job are:
- contacts - a very large amount of jobs still get filled (at least in part) via contacts and "word of mouth". Especially smaller employers like to have someone they know vouch for the candidate, at least to the extent that the candidate isn't a total asshole and some companies now won't give more than a "yes, he worked on those dates" reference for former employees, for fear of lawsuits. Get yourself friends and associates in the business area you would like to work in.
- grades - they're just about the only evidence that you're competent in your new field.
- previous work experience - a lot of programming deals with particular business or technical information and someone with experince in a particular field will have a chance landing a job programming for that field; a former nurse at medical supply co., an accounting clerk for a in-house accounting software, etc. Most disciplines are getting computerized to at least some extent, so an older worker can try to put experience to work in the new job. I know of an ex-"blue collar" guy who used to work warehouse and delivery jobs and had to re-train after an accident; he managed to (eventually) get a job working on inventory software despite being over 50 with some modest disabilities. He started in Quality Assurance and then managed an in-house transfer to a coding position.
- the local market - if experienced people are on the streets looking for work, new coders are competing to some extent with that pool of talent. Newer training and lower salary demands can somewhat counter-balance this though.
- language skills - multilingual coders have an edge for some positions
Good luck.Re:Young emploees will work for less pay. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real problem is that employeers THINK they want more money. Thus they bypass them. The hirerers judge expectations based on other careers that are less volitile than IT and think that experience equates to more money expectations in all fields.
In reality us IT'ers know that managers often don't give a flying sh8t about experience beyond about 5 years because the abilities that experience improve, such as long-term maintanable code, are not readily visable to them.
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:4, Insightful)
In the field? Chances are good. At the same job? I doubt it.
It is obvious that to develop radically new things you have got to have very open-minded attitude and flexible thinking
That really depends on what the "new thing" is. Not all new things require open-mindedness or flexible thinking. Many new things require your experience to be applied in new ways, but that doesn't mean your experience is now obsolete.
So by the time my generation retires, the only thing people like me can count on is maintaining antique legacy stuff
With all due respect, that's entirely absurd. If you lock yourself into a technology, sure, you'll maintain legacy stuff. If you keep up on new technology constantly you'll find that there are very few "radically new things" in this field. Yes, there is constant advances, new concepts, etc. But it's only a "radical new thing" if you've been out of the field for 20 years. If you've been in the field for 20 years and keep up on stuff as it comes out you see a line of logical, incremental advances. So you'll only be maintaining legacy code if you learn VB in 2000 and don't learn anything else for the next 40 years.
Will there be enough work for those 5 people to maintain legacy C# code or linux kernel?
Again, you are basing this on an assumption of obsolence. Just keep up on new technolgies and you won't be doomed to legacy maintenance in the future. It's really not that hard.
Or will technological progress move so fast that their skills would be so obsolete that there will be at most need for just one person?
Again, you assume that schools will start cranking out students that are versed in a new technology that is so damn complex that people over 30 can't grasp it. That's nonsense. If anything, those with a firm understanding of today's technology are more likely to be able to adapt to new technologies than teaching something to brand new students. It has been my experience that it is easier for someone who has a complete understanding of 'C' to learn any given new technology that comes out. A new grab out of college has a hard time applying the THEORY he learned, let alone build new ideas and concepts on top of that.
In all, you have a very fatalistic attitude towards your future in the industry. If you really believe what you're saying I'd get out of the field. I definitely won't be maintaining legacy code in 30 years, but if you are convinced that's what YOU'LL be doing you have a big chance of being right.
Re:Been there...still doing that (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:MOD THIS UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Only experience and variety of experience can give you that.
Bad news for you: EE is not where it's at either (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, lo and behold, after four years in the workforce, two layoffs, slavedrivers at my first job, all that work is being farmed off to Asia, eastern Europe and other low-paying locales. No joke - you can walk to an average ASIC provider with $200,000 and get a 2 Million gate ASIC with an embedded ARM, SRAMS, and ADC/DACs designed turn key. Those types of ASICs with design services used to cost almost ten times that amount. That also includes mask and tooling costs, btw.
In fact, most of the rest of hardware engineering has cratered in the same way. Cheap foreign labor has usurped the profession because electronic devices, like software, have for the most part become non-locale-specific commodities. Those electronic devices only need to pass Underwriters Laboratories or Canadian Standards Association safety certifications, and if they don't they just get redesigned. No engineer in electronics that I have ever known in my short career has needed their Professional Engineering degree, but I'll tell you that none of these guys who would have a product for sale here in North America would sign off on the design documents and be personally liable for them if they were designed outside of the United States and Canada, even under their project control.
Contrast this with, say, civil engineering, where the engineer has to stamp his life away on the lower left corner of the blueprint of that bridge or building, and if something goes wrong and it falls down and kills people, it's his ass. Plus, they need to be on-site almost all the time, because they're virtually all locale-specific type of projects at one point or another, particularly when it comes to the geotechnical aspect of it. I sure as hell wouldn't trust someone to design and spec out bridge trusses if they lived somewhere else, nor would I want it to be built on a mound of quicksand (as the Alberta Provincial Legislature was).
What's even more sad is that I've personally seen cover-ups of folks whose consumer electronic devices have burnt up in the end application due to overcurrent latch-up on a power IC, yet nobody needed their P.E./P.Eng. designation. Only in higher voltage power systems design has an EE required his/her professional designation and to stick his/her neck out. Well, that and for those who develop military and aerospace systems. But who cares if a piece of software asserts a line too long or wiggles it the wrong way to send a device into a tizzy, right?
The real solution is to reregulate the profession such that safety, both software and hardware side, become personal liabilities for those who have designed them. Small errors are liabilities for civil, mining, chemical, and mechanical engineers that need to be corrected. Yet small errors in functinoality are things that "we just have to live with" and accept for redesign. You can bet diamonds to dollars that the SW/HW design clowns outside this country have virtually full immunity on a personal if something happens or will at most get fired. Big whoop. Once you change SW/HW engineering to a locale-specific and safety-specific craft for which individuals become personally accountable and necessary locally, you will fundamentally restore dignity to the profession and cauterize the wounds that are causing the outflow of this profession to other countries.
As for me, after a couple of layoffs and general disgruntlement with the profession, I'm going to look at getting into management consulting and using my MBA a bit more. God knows half the companies I used to work for sure need an internal overhaul. But it's cultural- and location-specific type of work, it is very versatile, you can consult for yourself or someone else, and you can't farm most of it out because it needs to be local.
Re:Been there...done that (Score:5, Insightful)
30+ is old??? (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, most people I see in this business fell into it from other fields entirely. I've only met a few out here in the real world that actually went to school specifically for programming. Most got degrees in other fields.
I really don't know that age is that much of a factor either, except that the younger ones actually chose the field during college instead of afterwards.
Re:Don't count on it (Score:5, Insightful)
Age discrimination is a real and serious problem in many industries. This post is not an attempt to defend that illegal practice.
Having said that, the key question is whether the older programmer generates enough value for the company, compared to a younger programmer. Programmer A with five years of experience might get something done (by that I mean debugged and ready to ship) in half the time than programmer B fresh out of school. That means the company can afford to pay programmer A about twice what programmer B is paid. Everybody is happy.
Problem is, programmer C with ten years of experience isn't going to get stuff done in half the time of programmer B! Your salary as a function of personal productivity must taper off at some point, possibly even cutting into the company's profits.
We can easily see that even an honest company may essentially have to freeze the wages of older programmers, or lay them off altogether. What we need is a way for older programmers to become more productive, and I think the answer is for them to teach. If old programmer C can make young programmer B more productive, then C deserves part of the additional value generated by B. If C can teach several young programmers D, E, and F, then their additional productivities can help sustain C's salary requirements.
This of course requires a pretty enlightened employer, but it also requires programmers to understand that they will hit their pay ceiling pretty early in their career, unless they take on slightly different jobs as they progress through their careers.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've been employed before (Score:3, Insightful)
If all else fails, kill yourself.
Insightfull ??? More like ignorant. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Been there...done that (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm 25 and a programmer. When I was in college and writing webapps for the university, I was asked to run their student computer support store on an interim basis for a few months. I was supervising a half dozen part-time techs. I hated it, but recognized that I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity to try my hand at management without making a long term committment. I know keeping a few techs in line isn't the same as running a development shop, but to some extent managing coworkers will be the same in any management position.
Ever since then, I've been able to confidently answer the standard "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" interview question by saying I see myself as a senior/lead developer. One of the things I look for in a potential employer is a recognition that a development team can benefit from having two promotion tracks - technical and business.
Many companies don't have the technical track. If programming is what you want to do with your life, find one that does.
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm sorry, I can't hire you because you haven't demonstrated that you can keep up with the technology."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, it says here that you wrote the kernel for Windows 95, but nothing about experience with Windows Server 2003. And you seem very efficient in Perl, C, C++ and Java, but we're using C#. And to top things off, you drive a Buick Regal and don't have any body piercings. We can't possibly hire you because you're married and have kids, which means we won't be your sole overriding priority in life."
Re:It ain't cuz they're geniuses... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you can make them stay in the office longer. However, the number of hours you stay in the office is not a good measure of productivity. Just like countings lines of code.
If you spend a week writing and debugging 2000 lines of code, and I spend half an hour downloading an open source lib from the net that does the same thing and more and solves the same problem, who is more productive?
Re:Young emploees will work for less pay. (Score:4, Insightful)
ANY person with a current job is not likely to switch for less. You have to assume that a person doing a good job is going to get a few raises along the way, so the older person SHOULD be making more than a newbie. If that is not the case, you have to wonder why. A recently unemployed person is going to try and hold out for whatever they made before. The long-term unemployed person has a salary of $0; therefore any offer is an improvement.
Think of an IT shop as if it were a sports team. Nobody has the budget to put a star at every position. Most teams would like to keep the stars they have, develop new stars from their own ranks, and fill the occasional specialty need from the outside.
There ARE situations where your team really needs a star in a certain position, and it makes sense to pay a premium for a free agent. Younger people are like draft picks. You might get a future star, you might not. Young people with language skills and top-notch degrees are the first-round draft picks. Random H1Bs are the 20th round. There are some possibilities in between. Can you sign a 20th round draft pick (for peanuts) and get a star? Sure, it happens. Just don't plan on building the entire team this way; the statistics will catch up with you eventually.
Older workers are the free agents. Some of them are established stars and worth a premium salary. Some have years of experience, but not as much success as the stars. They are not worth a premium salary, and sometimes not worth as much as they are currently making. Every team has a few players whose compensation exceeds their value. In some cases, their skills have dimished; everyone KNOWS these people will be making less with their next team, assuming they can stay in the game at all.
So if my team needs a second-string linebacker, I might look first to the draft picks, or perhaps a free agent if the price is right. If I need a starting quarterback, I probably have to pay a premium to sign a free agent star.
The problem is that we have too many IT teams who are perfectly willing to put mediocre talent on the field. Some of them have lost the ability to identify talent; they just make sure to have a body at each position. They will tolerate lousy performance as long as the payroll is kept under control. There are sports teams like this also; you find them at the bottom of the standings. When a few decent teams manage to demonstrate the value of winning, nature will take its course and things will change.
Forget IT if it isn't working for you (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a different world now...I promise. Move with it or die...it's really that simple.
Stop being so IT centric and give yourself credit for being able to make decisions without panicing. Then look around and realize what an asset this can be and find an employer that values that. You can jump into any other field and find a home...project management is needed from the medical industry to tourism...from energy management to child adoption.
Why limit yourself, when so many others are already trying to do that as well. You are in charge of you...take a chance and find out what you can really do. You may just learn something about yourself in the process.
Re:Don't count on it (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, in my current job, I'd much rather be handling software pumped out by some older guys that knew what the heck was going on. I see too many bugs to think that a new hot shot programmer can actually do the job the Right Way.
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:1, Insightful)
And I can't speak for other geezers, but I have not lost any interest in learning. I pick up an average of a new language every year. And I've found that the best job security is found by doing one hell of a job.
Re:young enough to repaint...old enough to sell (Score:3, Insightful)
Programmers, when properly trained/skilled, are prime examples of individuals that live and die by being organized. They understand how to prototype and draft and forecast. They know how to allocate and redirect and terminate and archive. They now how to start, stop and restart.
These are all things that define project managers. Project management/planning is one of the highest demand categories in modern industry. A good project manager can make or break an otherwise successful product. If you've run out your interest in coding, or you're simply not able to find a programming job, consider project management in any of a hundred fields. You'd be surprised how interesting it can be, and how useful your present skill set is going forward. My background allows me to talk directly to our software people, and they appreciate that. My background allows me to build my own custom tools, instead of writing a clumsy spec that some intern has to try to follow. My background allows me to prototype in minutes what would take a team days...and if someone wants me to make a decision based solely on the information on the white board, my background allows me to imagine the flow of details quickly and with confidence. I manage projects....and without programming skills to back me up, I'd be forced to carry a crystal ball.
Again, many industries need planners and project managers. Don't let the job define you...step in and define your work by your own standards. Find a company with a problem that needs your skills at large, not just as a programmer, but as someone that can see the big and the small of it. Someone that can handle details and deadlines....detours and debates....specifications and routines. You can still write scripts and run data dumps...you're in charge, remember?
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:5, Insightful)
"Elvis sat on it" doesn't make a chair antique. A collectors-item maybe, but that is not the same as antique.
The chair in the antique store represents a lot more workmanship (experience and quality) and has passed through many proud owners hands and will be a welcome addition to a sophisticated new home.
While the chair in the thrift shop is almost falling apart and the previous owner was happy to get rid of it. The new owner shopping at the thrift store, if any, is just looking for the best bargain sitting equipment, new or old, but mainly cheap.
Connect the dots, fill in the analogy. Apply to real life.
Re:30+ is old??? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am also 37, and my first degree was in English. (Really, the English major was just an excuse to study anything that interested me so besides literary theory, creative writing, history and music, I also made it to Calc II, some other sciences and took a couple programming courses).
But I really didn't get back into computing until I was 26. Started re-learning programming by reading, and by developing databases and web-based applications. Later became lead developer at a couple different companies. Between free-lancing and full-time employment I have never been more than a month without work, even after the dot-com crunch.
One of those companies had two C.S. graduates, and two of us with no CS or IT degree, yet we were the ones doing the programming. Even though we tried to share our books and ideas with the others, it just didn't really happen, so they ended up doing other things, such as system administration, web design, etc... Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the point is programming is a passion, and no degree in the world will change that. Smart employers learn to look for those with the passion, not the degree.
As lead developer at my current job, I personally will be happy to hire and work with developers of any age, as long as they are the kind of people who bother to continue learning. And its not about whether they know Java or C# or PHP. Conceptual ability is much more important than rote knowledge of implementations.
Re:Don't count on it (Score:3, Insightful)
Experience is great, and you need it to avoid some pitfalls. But having it doesn't mean you will avoid them, and experience has a few pitfalls of it's own.
Enthusiasm is the advantage of the young. I myself am a lousy programmer when I'm bored. More experienced programmers may be able to solve a problem more easily, but younger programmers haven't already felt the thrill of solving it a couple hundred times.
When I was a young programmer, I'd come home at night and write other programs for the hell of it. These days, I'll sometimes stay at work late (knowing I'll get chewed out by my wife) if I'm working on something satisfying. In 10 or 20 years, I just can't see coding being one of the top 2 or 3 things capturing my interest.
Re:30+ is old??? (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know where _you_ would have been had you had a BS degree? Your BA degree obviously opened enough doors to satisfy your appetite, but maybe the BS degree would have opened more or better doors and there is not way to find that out but speculation.
Sure, learning is more than just a result of a particular university degree and never stops, but a good start is a good start and if you think that universities exist mainly to let people socialize then you've had a little too many mind-freeing substances during your time.
Universities collect knowledge and spread them towards their students. And it's up to the students to use or throw away that knowledge. I'm sure that there is a lot of knowledge that your university basically wasted on you since you decided to take another path. Sure, the paper is important to open doors, without it a lot stay closed. But after the door opens knowledge and skills keep you in, and it helps a lot if you picked those up in between socializing and just plain having fun.
Re:Job chances for x workers - not that good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It ain't cuz they're geniuses... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps writing that 250 line perl script would have been an even better choice.
In Silicon Valley... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course the philosophy at big software shops is different. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM all like to recruit directly out of college/grad school. It's easier to teach people the "right" way to do things that way. This also lets them pay people less. Of course they are able to do this because they don't need people to be immediately productive. They can afford to invest a few years of brainwashing, err training.
You are only employable in an ideal world (Score:3, Insightful)
- The first two points will weed you out of a company that insits upon deadlines and schedules, with managers that presume highly of their abilities to budget and schedule everything oh-so brilliantly.
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The last two points are guaranteed to prevent you from getting jobs at Microsoft-dependand shops, or anywhere that is stuck in vendor-lock in general, since they are essentially building on proprietary bases.
This opens the larger and somewhat off-topic debate: True freedom only exists when you are no longer dependant upon money.You'll surely notice that only CEOs or politicians can have a claim at true freedom: their salary is high enough that if they reach a "mutual disagreement" with the organization, they can afford to just hand over their resignation, take a few months of vacation and reappear at the helm of another organization 6 months later.
Meanwhile, most mere mortals actually need a job to make ends meet and are therefore forced into making decisions that go against their moral principles, such as accepting a job doing somehting they hate.
The obvious conclusion is that since their is no freedom without financial independance, there is also no democracy except among truely free men who can afford the consequences of their decisions.
Re:Been there...done that (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes we do. A good lawyer will eventually become a partner in the firm, at which point their job will be a) selling new work b) supervising younger lawyers and c) handing the really tricky cases that the associates can't. The same is true in civil engineering, accounting, management consulting, even medicine (don't you watch ER?
What you should be asking is, what makes programmers different?
Re:Funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
while we kids all say: "Companies don't want us, in this market they want people with experience."
You will find that there is a "sweet spot" in your career, between 3 and 6 years experience. Any less than that and you're probably still a "graduate trainee", any more than that and you're starting to make financial and personal commitments (mortgage, kids, whatever) and your price goes up and your availability (late nights, weekends, etc) goes down.
In the first 3 years of your career, don't even worry about money (altho' money si good too
Re:Older coders welcomed where needed (Score:2, Insightful)
It is a rare manager that just needs some code pounded out. What managers need is someone who can understand what the project is, help in the planning, coordinate with others, actually write waht was asked for, offer ideas on how to make it better, and interact with customers to understand their needs. Managers also want someone who is likely to stay with the company for longer than six months - hiring people is hard work.
Older workers generally have those skills from having had to learn them in previous work situations while younger workers are still developing their skills in those areas.
There are exceptions of course - there are younger workers who can do those things just are there are totally clueless older workers.
All in all I would think that older programmers would find it easier to get jobs.
Age masks more important factors (Passion, etc.) (Score:2, Insightful)
I started when I was 13 and am 35 now. I'm a guru. People who picked up programming as a job skill in college tend to be weaker. Also, people who hopped into the biz in the dot-com era because it was hot lack the passion and mindset.
So a 30 year old web-designer probably picked up coding in their mid 20's in 1999 (any punk with a nose ring who looked cool could get a job in web design back then). Likewise, a 50 year old is more likely to have been working the back room of an insurance company sice '74.
Both are a different breed from us 35-45 senior dev or architect types, who grew up coding till 3am on our Commodore 64's, and who had it imprinted on our then-pubescent brains. Our age is not as important as the history it correlates with.
Alvin Toffler said: (Score:2, Insightful)
I also wrote something about this before [slashdot.org] that I think people would enjoy reading.
In a word, lousy (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me put it this way: on a techie mailing list I'm on, with maybe 30-50 heavy posters, and including people who some of y'all might recognize the name, the last time we polled ourselves, last year, we had over a dozen of us out of work. Since then, several have gotten jobs...and several more lost 'em.
This matches what I read in
In the Chicago area, when I left for FL in Jan, it was about 20%.
Does the word "depression" come to mind?
And for the jobs that are available, HR, who, in general, barely know how to bring up email, put a laundry list of languages *and* packages that would require any three people to cover, and don't want to pay for it.
I've recently seen one in my neck of the woods, that want an experienced person to do troubleshooting and installs, with up to 75% travel, and they want to pay $30k/yr for this. Would you like fries with that?
Finally, there's yet another, almost unprovable issue: ageism. I'll bet you a drink that the interview I had last spring, I didn't get the job, because the owner was early 30s, and everyone else in the office seemed to be early 20s.
At 50+, I wouldn't "fit into the culture".
Meanwhile, let's all just sit back, watch them CEOs take their paid-for GOP legislators' tax breaks, and export jobs overseas (e.g., IBM's 500 seat call center in India), and bring cheap labor H1b's over here. Ah, unions and labor laws are *so* 20th century...as is a decent living.
mark, programmer/software developer/Unix/Linux sysadmin, 23 yrs experience, 21+ mos. out of work
Quit whinning; do what you love. (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe in doing what you love and not worry about money. In our field, it's actually quite easy to accomplish.
And I'm sick of this "IT" this "IT" that; everytime someone tells me that he works in "IT," I'd ask them exactly what they do. None of them knows crap about technology or computers. I'm sick of the constant whining by "HTML Coders." They deserve what they got for dropping school/job/whatever to join the dotCom gold rush.
I'm damn sick of computer science students not knowing shit about computers. If you came into this field for the money, what right do you have whinning about your income? The field no longer offer you the good pay; then leave. Switch to investment banking or car repair or strip dancing. Stop whinning.
A poet never think about striking rich; they do what they feel passionate about. Programmers shouldn't be any different. If Linus didn't get paid for Linux, why should you demand a certain pay? If I were the recruiter, I will reject you whinners because only failures worry about salaries, not the work to accomplish. Be thankful that we are damn lucky to be able to make a good living doing what we love.
It's bad times. So what? I know of people who can't wait to retire and I know of people who just love doing what they do and refuse to retire. Your happiness is your choice.
Managers prefer people younger than themselves (Score:2, Insightful)