
Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012) - luu
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/bay-area-technology-professionals-cant-get-hired-as-industry-moves-on.html
======
markbnj
So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software
engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and
I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. I read this same refrain over and
over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a
common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Learning
the next thing is a wearisome burden for many of them. If you get to that
point in your career, then yes, that's pretty much death in this business. If
you haven't moved into management by that point consider another line of work.

For my own part, this is still what I love to do. I'm busy 10 or more hours a
day and at least eight of them are spent with some technology I knew nothing
about six months ago. I was layed off from another startup at the end of
September and started this current gig three weeks later. We just finished
five weeks ramping up on Google Container Engine, during which time I also
learned to use GNU make for the first time, and learned about etcd and Google
Compute Engine. What it boils down to is this: stay interested, and stay
current, and you stay employed. If those things are not within your power you
no longer belong in this craft.

~~~
jordanb
As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull
off a long career, it gives me hope.

If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design:
electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has
successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I
suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in until it
suddenly wasn't.

It's a long way from webdev though. And yeah these are presumably smart guys
who could pick up webdev, but could they make the career transition without
getting bumped back down to Junior by the hiring manager? And who wants to
hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

There was an article recently about YCombinator shifting its investments to
biotech. Suppose webdev dried up and all the funding started flowing to
biotech. I'm sure I could learn what I'd need to know and I bet you could too,
but could we head over to the biotech companies and sell ourselves as "middle
aged web guys, self taught biotech engineers (no experience)?"

~~~
danieltillett
As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront
in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who
have tried to learn, but they have all struggled.

Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old
developers they are far worse for old scientists.

~~~
lqdc13
Biotech also pays a lot less.

If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries
are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it
requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around
35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.

Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior
bioinformatician.

~~~
collyw
"even though it requires more knowledge than either"

It doesn't usually require more knowledge. The majority of bioinformaticians
that I know are pretty poor coders, and know just enough Perl or Python to
count some stuff up an do some stats on it or plot a graph. They have no idea
how to set up a server, write maintanable code, design a database well or keep
a website secure. Obviosuly there are exceptions, but the majority that I have
worked with are junior level programmers with knowledge of biology.

~~~
1971genocide
"knowledge of biology"

I am not sure you fully appreciate what " knowledge of biology" means. As a
programmer who did a lot of molecular biology in the past - doing molecular
biology is not simple. The learning curve for a lot of biological topics -
especially the ones that get close to organic chemistry is really steep.

~~~
danieltillett
This is something that I have seen people with a CS or EE background really
underestimate. The amount of biology information you need to keep in your head
is huge. There is not a core of day-to-day knowledge that you can use and look
up the rest when you need, you need to keep all of it in your head just to get
the most basic things done.

~~~
1971genocide
Its the same everywhere.

Programmers underestimating the value/knowledge of accountants/lawyers.

Businessman assuming tech work is simple.

People by default assume what looks simple for someone to do must be simple -
even if they spent 10,000+ hours practicing it.

------
steven2012
I'm in my 40s and recently changed jobs. Every single company that I sent my
resume to contacted me and I got through the phone screens on all but 1. That
company sent a frontend developer just out of college to interview me, but I'm
pure backend and didn't know too many frontend concepts, which flummoxed the
interviewer. He basically had no idea how to interview me and gave up.

Of the companies I went onsite to, half of them gave me offers. The others
didn't, but not because of ageism but because my interview performance wasn't
as strong as I hoped (asking questions in areas I wasn't prepared for, lack of
expertise in their desired programming lang, screwed up the coding question,
etc). All of the offers I received were an increase from my current job.

Overall I would say that ageism doesn't exist. Employers want people that can
contribute quickly without a lot of handholding and without training. This
applies whether or not you are a fresh grad or a veteran programmer. If you
instill confidence that you are highly qualified to the interviewer, you will
generally get the job.

And as someone who has been intimately involved in the hiring process as a
hiring manager, I can say the same thing. I've interviewed people of a variety
of ages and the only takeaway I care about is will they hit the ground running
and contribute to the team quickly. That's why software developers are highly
paid. When I first started working, IBM would give aptitude tests completely
unrelated to programming, and if you did well, you would get a job and be
trained.

Unfortunately those days don't exist anymore, for the most part. It's a
problem caused strictly because of how highly paid engineers are. If salaries
were 50-60k, then I'm pretty sure companies would be more apt to training and
waiting for new people to get on board. But salaries are easily 3X that in the
Valley, so at that price, you need to be contributing very quickly otherwise
you're a waste of money.

~~~
eru
Ageism does exist in some companies. But like any bad bias, clever companies
can exploit that, and thereby reduce the impact.

------
dwarman
Don't know where I sit in this bell curve. Probaby far to the right. The
question is - what moral to the story can be gained from my case.

I turn 68 next month. 7 years ago I was cold-call recruited (they called, not
me) and offered by three companies all wanting embedded systems expertise. All
at the same time. Never rains but it pours, eh?

Two were boring embedded Linux. One was fun gaming console OS. Audio SDK and
DSP, specifically (although I was not pointed there for a good year after
hiring). I'm still there. And the interesting bit is - I had never coded Audio
or DSP before. They liked my technology surfing history, that wide 'T' shaped
profile on LI. And, clearly, age had nothing to do with it. Experience, proven
adaptability, and quick at learning new stuff did. Is my theory, anyway. But
that is not something one can decide to add to the CV in a panic after the
fact of layoffs. It starts in ones' teens and never stops.

But then, this is an established Japanese company in Seattle. Two major
differences to SV start-ups.

~~~
br3w5
The media likes to imply that the only tech companies are start-ups or Google,
FB, Amazon and Apple but in reality there are plenty more established
companies looking to implement new (and well-established) technologies.

------
lsc
Now, this is just my impression... I have no statistics to back this up. But
I've been working in IT for 20 years, and eh, it is changing. The sort of
person who gets hired is changing.

My impression is that the industry is changing... not really in the tools we
use (UNIX is older than I am; we keep re-hashing some combination of C and
lisp, it seems that virtualization tech is on a one decade cycle. It's the
same shit, new packaging) - no, the industry is changing because more "normal
people" are entering it. Standards are going up in terms of expectations of
things like social skills, being tall, good looking, etc, etc, all the things
you'd expect to need to succeed in sales or management or other things that a
normal person might do. My observation of my unemployed friends; the sort of
people who were seriously into computers in the early to mid '90s, is that
they are generally rejected on "cultural fit" grounds. "You aren't cool enough
to work here"

I mean, it's still way easier in tech than in sales, for a person with poor
social skills or poor confidence, a man who is short, or someone who is plain
ugly, but every year, the vast difference between sales and engineering seems
to be shrinking. It's pretty dramatic, really, because when I started in the
'90s, it seemed like this was the haven for people who were not welcome
anywhere else. Being smart enough to do the job excused a lot of negative
attributes that would not have been excusable in other fields.

~~~
HillaryBriss
When the investing community saw Facebook pull a shit ton of cash directly out
of the sky, it said "We must be 'social.' Social is the way, the truth and the
life."

Couple that with the following realization: the folks in pure product
innovation roles at startups -- the people who are supposed to be insightful
oracles creating compelling visions and perfect shortlists of vital user
stories for killer apps -- these people are not ... really ... that ... good.
(Even the ones from Stanford.)

So, now programmers must define the product, create the product AND sell the
product (with their cool, unshaven, youthful faces).

All programmers must now be brogrammers. The pure nerd work is sent overseas.

------
MCRed
Due to a startup failing I had occasion to do two job searches in the course
of a year. For one, I had %100 correlation-- when the call was a video call
(Even to HR reps who know nothing about technology) I wouldn't get called
back. Now I'm not ugly, I'm handsome, but my beard is white. On the other
hand, when the contact would be via phone call only, I would get offers.

This is with bay area startups. Outside the bay area I can't say... but
because I'm not in the bay area and all interaction with them was remote I can
say there was a comparison to be made.

It's the dipthong startups that are the problem-- these kids these days don't
know nothing about technology and believed Mark Zuckerberg on the Startup
School stage in 2007 when he said "Don't hire anyone over 30 years old! Young
people just get it." (paraphrasing, but I was there, it was obvious he had no
understanding of the concept of wisdom.)

Anyway, discrimination means you miss out on the best people-- and at least
according to my employers, they're pretty grateful to have me.

But pebble, digital ocean, and the like... they can't see past the grey beard.

~~~
Animats
Shave.

------
fencepost
I seem to recall seeing this a few years ago, and I think the same basic
addition still applies.

"Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can't Get Hired in Bay Area Technology
Companies and Startups as an Industry Moves On."

------
bburshteyn
Many great businesses were started by founders aged 50+.

"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when
they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were
younger than twenty-five."

Cites: [https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-
entrepreneurs-...](https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-entrepreneurs
--the-startup-mentality-is-not-bound-by-age-000959494.html) ;
[http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-
do/research/2009/04/educatio...](http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-
do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship)

~~~
ajmurmann
I'm always do relieved to be reminded of this. I'm in my early thirties and an
getting nervous about the window of opportunity passing.

~~~
Frondo
Don't worry about that. The thing you'd want to worry about, if anything, is
spending years just grinding away in your one little niche.

Lots of old people start companies, but the key to success is having a wide
variety of experience, and not being afraid to get more (like sales! like
marketing! and so on!).

You can do it! (I did! And just landed my 4th customer for a high-dollar-value
subscription service!)

------
fit2rule
45 years old, been a professional developer since I was 13 (sold my first code
in '83), been through all the ropes in 3 decades .. and am now facing the
agism of this industry with a fury.

My advice to all of you - young or old - is never forget to learn new things.
Always have at least 5% of your stack of things, to do with learning something
new. Software development is not a 'career': its an art form. There will
always be new states of the art, and as an evolving process, will necessarily
involve abandoning the old and continuing with the new.

Nobody cares if you're old. Everybody cares if you've been doing it for 30
years and still can't write a parser, or compile a new library, or spend 8
hours to hack up some code in a new language that nobody knows about yet. Keep
that stuff up, newbies and old-folks alike .. its the only way forward.

------
tatx
In today’s tech environment, you have to be a fickle programmer to get
yourself hired. With age however most people learn just the opposite - to be
less fickle and more focused.

I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and
false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the
industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products,
hoping they will stick. These guys built a CAD product on the cloud called
Onshape, check out their engineering team -
[https://www.onshape.com/team](https://www.onshape.com/team)

~~~
angelbob
The passing phase in question has been going on for 10+ years. Up to 20,
depending how you count.

------
rokhayakebe
Old Techies/Janitors/Bartenders/Drivers/Personal Assistants/Writers/etc.....
Never Die....

There is this sense that many problems are unique to one industry when they
are shared across many.

------
navbaker
My uncle is a 65 year old COBOL programmer who has never been out of work.

~~~
angelbob
A reminder that one way to keep your job security is to learn an important
legacy tech really well.

I have high hopes for Ruby on Rails -- it won't have the longevity of COBOL,
but it's gonna be a nightmare of a legacy system ;-)

~~~
xacaxulu
In some cases, Rails already is a nightmare legacy system. Lot's of fun
upgrading Rails 2 apps on the side.

------
mixmastamyk
Didn't think much about this until recently, and while gainfully employed,
haven't been able to find a new interesting job this year despite actively
looking. It's now November.

I'm an expert-level python, web, and javascript dev, with wide experience in
admin and QA as well. In my 40s, up to date, and a much better developer than
I was a decade ago.

------
rollthehard6
Although it's obviously more of a problem for hardware people judging by this
article, this makes me glad, as a sysadmin, that my career has been almost
exclusively contract based.

This wasn't much of a conscious choice, it was just the way it panned out for
me early on but after 21 years in IT and only 1.5 years of that in 'permanent'
employment, I feel glad that this way of working has forced me to chop and
change roles, technologies and sectors so that I have done UNIX/Linux SA, DBA
and storage work and have had some recent AWS/ansible experience too.

If I had stayed at my first 'enterprise' role, I could probably be in some
management role now or be in a technical role that would have made me hard to
employ elsewhere too. I'm much happier that I think I now have a record of
varied experience showing I can pick up new stuff.

------
bburshteyn
50+ here, starting
[https://www.trycryptomove.com](https://www.trycryptomove.com). Some of the
top cybersecurity advisors (and our increasingly growing list of pilot
customers) seem to believe in me just fine. Age is just a number!

Languages, tools, and frameworks evolve (including the brand new distributed
programming language I invented, 'Hello', available at
[http://www.amsdec.com/](http://www.amsdec.com/)).

But good software architecture and engineering is an art that improves with
time.

~~~
wwweston
Which is why so many job postings request "generally good software
architecture and engineering skills" instead of "5+ years with Amazeballs
Framework and HotLang."

~~~
HillaryBriss
so true and so typical.

Amazeballs wasn't even invented until 2014. we all know that.

stupid recruiters.

------
eCubeH
Some of these guys may be super specialized, and not find easy opportunities
in their line. Others may just not be agile enough to stay on top of the
latest thing that came up in the last 6 months, which is perhaps more of a
DevOps mentality.

But on the hardware aspect, I would think there is hope. Given the increasing
move towards the new maker mode of desktop fabrication & IoT, there should be
demand for people with hardware skill sets that integrate well with web, cloud
& mobile.

The problem always remains that the smartest minds are frequently poor at
marketing themselves.

------
acconrad
From what I'm gathering as a developer moving into 30, you have two options:

1\. Market yourself so that when you hit the pay ceiling, you can move into
consulting/freelancing with enough of a name for yourself that you can justify
your rates to businesses.

2\. Move into management. If you hate marketing, start looking for
management/mentoring opportunities now so that your next promotion/job has
some sort of manager title, which will continue your mobility up to the
Director -> VP -> C-level.

~~~
hwstar
3\. Squirrel away as much as possible while you have that high paying job and
retire early. When retired, work on open source hardware and software.

~~~
toomuchtodo
So much this. Save as much as possible when you're young; just like football
players and strippers (or any industry where age is paramount), it doesn't
last forever.

EDIT: 32. Didn't save enough in my 20s. Saving as much as I can now (living
below my means, paid off my mortgage, maxing out 401K/HSA/IRAs).

------
aresant
In legal / medicine / accounting / other fields there are annual license
requirements for continued education.

Obviously these fields move slower than tech but would be fascinating to see
what could be put together to broadly engage and keep technical people (self
included) on their toes.

Mix the curriculum between the applied (new languages / dbs / OS), emerging
market exposure (vr / crypto currency / self driving), and the novel (snapchat
/ vine / etc).

------
xacaxulu
One thing I do at least once every 6 months is freshen up my CV and apply for
jobs. The process of looking at job postings, talking to recruiters and noting
what you're getting the most calls/emails about can help you decide where to
focus your energies in the next 1-3 years and/or spot trends early.

------
brudgers
Date (2012).

~~~
dang
Thanks—added.

------
graycat
The article has

"stay on the cutting edge".

Ha! The real _leading edge_ is work that is at least "new, correct, and
significant" and published in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in
_information technology_ , yes, and also powerful and valuable in practice.

So, put on resume that have published in original mathematical statistics for
detecting zero-day problems, in artificial intelligence, and in optimization,
and still get silence. With Silicon Valley, _leading edge_ has no connection
with peer-reviewed original research!

So, do a startup. Web development? Taught myself -- the Web page code works
fine. The difficulty was a lot of poorly written documentaiton. The software
was fast, fun, and easy.

"Leading edge"? Yup -- my startup is based on some original applied math I
derived, complete with theorems and proofs. Likely and apparently I'm the only
person in the world who understands that work. Definitely _leading_.

The problem my work solves, a lot of people have regarded as important. So
far, I have the only good solution. Some of the people trying to solve the
problem say that the solution I have is impossible -- they didn't understand
what the heck they were talking about. They couldn't come up with a
counterexample why not or a theorem of why can. The people just were not very
good.

Problem is, really, _leading_ is not what Silicon Valley is looking for. They
wouldn't know the real stuff about _leading_ if it slapped them in the face.
My best published papers, nearly no one in Silicon Valley has the
prerequisites to read, and likely no one outside of Stanford or Berkeley and
only a few people there.

Instead of _leading_ , they want two years of experience in just what the heck
low grade, routine, simple minded, poorly documented API or OSS they are
struggling with today.

Those people are being self-taught on their way to the _leading edge_ and are
floundering around and stand not to get to the _leading edge_. E.g., they keep
saying _Bayesian_ and _power law_ but don't know the difference between the
weak and strong laws of large numbers or about conditional expectation, non-
parametric hypothesis tests, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, anything about
martingales, the Neyman-Pearson lemma, etc., enough about conditioning even to
understand the definition of a Markov process, a basic result such as

E[E[Y|X]] = E[Y]

the role of sigma algebras, or any such things.

Early in my career, I started in computing and started to get self-taught in
the often associated applied math. I made good progress in some things but
otherwise floundered around with low quality materials, etc.

Then I went for a good Ph.D. and got one. Now I can say, nearly no one in
Silicon Valley startups is in any significant sense even near the _leading
edge_ and, instead, they are just floundering around.

Back to my startup -- a few good days and I should be able to go live.

~~~
auvrw
> the role of sigma algebras

i.e. the definition of probability? yea, i expected ppl to be more interested
in that, myself

otoh, be careful about minimizing other skill sets. doesn't take much more
than basic arithmetic on the math side to understand the linux kernel, but the
skills needed to be productive with such an engineering challenge aren't any
kind of joke.

~~~
graycat
It's easy enough in elementary treatments of probability to say what is meant
by random variables X and Y are _independent_. And in both theory and
applications, independence is just crucial. Well, what about uncountably
infinite collections A and B of random variables being independent? Also,
random variables that are functions of independent random variables are
independent, etc. The sigma algebra generated by a random variable, or a
collection of such, is important to be able to work with. E.g., just in the
Poisson process, that is, the vanilla arrival process, need to talk about the
time to the next arrival being independent of all of the past of the process.

> Linux kernel

Difficult? Right. No doubt by now it's huge, and I have to believe has many
patches. And I have to suspect that it's not well documented. And people that
use it especially want it for high end work where they make modifications, and
then the problems of complexity, documentation, testing, etc. get much worse.

Difficult? Yes. _Leading edge_ , not in the usual sense of knowledge. More
broadly, tough to make progress in any sense if still have to spend much
effort with the Linux kernel -- we're supposed to be past that by now. This
may be wrong for some niche need, but people should try to keep their careers
out of such niches.

Linux kernel performance? Might want some math there!

------
virtualsue
Something journalists like to say. Not true. Hacker News classic nonsense.

------
codeshaman
The more I examine it, the more I realise that at this point in time, the
programming profession is a trap.

I'll try to explain it.

1\. 20 years ago we were called "computer geeks". Young people fond of
computers. This term does not apply anymore. Now everyone under 20 is a
computer geek.

My daughter is 5. You know what 5-yo kids draw in school ? User interfaces.
That's right. Checkboxes and buttons and sliders. They don't know what they
are called, but they know how to use them. Every day they draw UIs and
computers and they play with them at school, then they come home and interact
with their tablets.

But that is the coming generation. Today, even if you've never seen a
computer, you can catch on pretty quickly, because:

2\. There is almost no entry barrier into the profession. After a month of
tutorials and interview training you can get a job as a junior developer. In
fact, there're so many learning opportunities right now that it doesn't seem
fair. _Anyone_ _anywhere_ can learn to do what you do - and better, because he
can learn from the best. And they can produce better code faster, because:

3\. Services like Github have trivialised code sharing and reuse.

Each library solves some kind of problem. Before, it required days or even
months of work and research. Now, it's just a 'pod install' or 'npm install' .

But it's good, right ? It's so much easier to develop software now... That's
true, however, given the way things are evolving: 3.1. If it has any 'general-
purpose' value, what you're working on right now is (or will soon be)
obsolete, because someone else will release it as an open source lib. Good for
everyone, not as good for all the programmers who would have been paid to
develop their version of it.

Of course, we can ride the wave and try to keep current with all that's
happening, right ? Well, turns out that's not so trivial anymore, because:

4\. The field has become extremely wide and each area is an ocean in itself.
Take 'the backend' : there are dozens of languages and frameworks, each of
them being updated weekly. Or iOS Development. Machine learning ? Computer
vision ? Sound engineering ? .... You did notice this didn't you ?

And if that isn't enough food for thought, then

5\. AI will eat our lunch pretty soon. Maybe 5, maybe 10 years from now, there
will be no 'programmers', because everyone will be a programmer. The tools,
libraries and techniques will be sufficiently advanced for anyone to speak the
requirements and design ideas and the AI will write all the underlying code.

AI combined with the 5 year olds of today who are already doing UX design.

Note that this wasn't the case 5-10 years ago. Before the iPhone, Github, Khan
academy and Coding Bootcamps, the industry was a different beast. What the
future holds is of course unknown, but the signs are that 'programming' is not
a skill that will feed you for the rest of your life. Time to think about
other things you're good ;).

~~~
ianmcgowan
I call BS (in as good natured and respectful way as possible), and I have my
own numbered list to share:

1) I've been hearing this every 5-10 years for the past 30 years, and it still
hasn't happened (which is enough to explain my scepticism but granted doesn't
prove anything).

2) The hardest part of what programmers do isn't pasting crap into an editor,
snapping blocks into scratch or waving their hands at Jarvis, it's
understanding the frickin' problem and thinking clearly about it.

3) The second hardest thing is maintaining that clarity while holding multiple
levels of abstraction in your head at the same time. Most people struggle with
this and don't really enjoy it. It may explain why people that like maths
gravitate to programming (and vice versa).

So, yeah, things are going to get weird (and awesome!), and maybe there will
be fewer job codes, but there will be a role for "explains things to
computers" until Skynet (or the Culture) is online. IMNSHO.

