
Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On - ojbyrne
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/bay-area-technology-professionals-cant-get-hired-as-industry-moves-on.html
======
DanielBMarkham
If you're unemployed (and wanting that situation to change) you need to pivot.
If you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen
up your coding skills, or you B.A. skills. If you've been coding something
nobody uses anymore, time to switch areas.

It bothers me that we treat unemployment as somehow a failure of the system.
As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs
make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the _world_ economy is
evolving. All of us had better get our asses in gear and catch up. Spend more
time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and
less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along.
I am very sorry that our education system is completely out of whack with what
we actually need. There area lot of folks with great credentials who are
lining up to create "jobs" programs that will have very poor results. But if
I'm an unemployed person, I can't help any of that. The only thing I can do is
to take responsibility, keep busy, and start my personal marketing/sales
machine.

I said that in a pretty cranky fashion because there's another point that's
missing in a lot of this discussion: I find as I get older my tolerance for
bullshit decreases. The first time you work for a bad PM who is destroying the
project you kind of buckle down, maybe struggle along, but generally put up
with it. After all, you have nothing in your life experience to give you
context. But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people
they are wrong -- nicely, of course -- than to spend six months on a death
march. I find that these conversations require a level of trust that younger
folks have difficulty giving older folks, and vice-versa. You either become
too "grumpy" or you become so passive as to be not worth a damn.

In many teams I have seen older workers tell the team that they have these
worries that are being unaddressed. In each case, it was way too easy for the
team to say "Old Jim is just a grumpy old guy, cranky and he has a bad
attitude" than it was to meet Jim half-way and go forward. I think there is a
real and measurable communication problem in technology teams between age
groups. I'm not sure what the magic bullet is going to be. Or if there is one.

~~~
untog
_As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs
make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is
evolving._

But is there a breaking point in the system? Across the board, industries are
becoming more efficient through technology, and require fewer workers. At the
same time, the birth rate is increasing. What is the end game here?

* Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along.*

That's very easy to say when you're employed. I suspect that a lot of people
out there would _love_ to pick up some experience, but have no means to do so.
Especially when you rule out "silly courses", too.

~~~
ChuckMcM
In developed countries the birth rate is negative. But you can pick up more
relevant skills getting a $35 raspberry pi board and bringing up a Linux
kernel on it then building a app for it than taking a "how to market yourself
to techies" class.

Work skills are like other possessions though where, when it comes time to
sell them, you have to know how valuable they are to the market which may be
different than what you think they should be worth.

~~~
ootachi
Bringing up a Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi is not a relevant skill.
Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn do not need kernel engineers.

~~~
nbm
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering&req=a2KA0000000La7yMAC)

(A Facebook job advert for Kernel Engineers.)

See also: <https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/> \- a write back persistent
block cache for Linux, written by some of the Kernel Engineers at Facebook.

(I work there.)

------
seclorum
I'm 42 and have managed to survive 25 years professionally in the computer
world, primarily as a software developer.

There is one, hard, fast rule for survival as a developer, and it has worked
very well for me for years. I will share it with you:

Follow the platform. Programming is all about the hardware.

How does it work? Its simple - programming on Windows for x86? Get yourself a
Mac and learn to hack on it in your spare time (by the way: no television or
other sedentary 'entertainment' activities - entertain yourself by learning
new things). Already a Mac code - get an iPhone, or learn Android. An iOS
developer already? Android master already? Alright then, time to get a
Beagleboard and do some Linux hacking. Already hacked on Linux? Get into CUDA.
CUDA genius already - okay, how about some of that Cloud tech ..

There is no safety in platform mastery, because those platforms are like
slippery barrels, spinning around and around, slowly sinking into redundancy.
If you are employed for one platform, entertain yourself with learning to
master another, newer or more interesting one.

This works, over and over.

------
jasonkester
There are two basic flavors of "old guy" in tech. We've all worked with the
ex-mainframe guy who still thinks at a punchcard pace and never really wrapped
his head around all this web stuff. He liked his old, stable job at Epson
because they had good benefits and a pension plan, but then the economy took a
downturn and now he's on your team. Many of us have worked with the other type
too, with 40 years of kicking ass under his belt, who can code you under the
table in javascript and ruby as easily as he can in C (or FORTRAN if he feels
like messing with you).

As you make your way through this world, you get to choose which of those
types you'd like to become. If you don't want the New York Times to write
sympathy articles about you, I'd suggest going with the latter route.

~~~
kabdib
I work with a developer who is 70. He kicks butt. It's amazing.

My father in law retired at 75, a C coder doing embedded systems for the chip
industry. He didn't kick people around, but was respected and was getting
stuff done.

I'm 50. I'd be happy to be either of those two people. I have little sympathy
for the people who say to themselves that they can stuff the career growth at
40 because they're doomed. Screw that, I have role models.

One thing that seems to help is: Be on a mission. Be on a fucking mission from
God, take charge of design AND do all the little crap. Build system
maintenance and code cleanup, who does that? Hint: It's not scutwork to make
sure that things are working well, all throughout a project.

------
jakejake
In this business, if you don't re-tool every few years you run a high risk of
becoming obsolete during what should be your golden years because that is just
about when whatever skills you learned in college may have totally phased out.

It is very easy to feel that you're at the top of the game when you just come
out of school and you're learning the latest bleeding-edge software
development techniques. You may look at the old dudes like myself and think
that we don't know what's going on. But unless you win the lottery or hit the
jackpot then you have to keep re-tooling every 3-4 years. You cannot allow
yourself to coast for very long. Just think about this - all of the time
you've invested in learning whatever it is that you are doing now - you will
have to re-do that same amount of effort every few years. It is sad because I
think of all the hours I spend programming pascal text-based airline
reservation systems. But alas those times are gone, I take from it what I can
and move on.

I've been in this for 20 years and it has consistently been about 3-4 years I
have to totally re-learn some new skills in order to stay competitive. Even
the past few months I've been in the trenches learning backbone.js,
require.js, building html5 apps, mobile apps. This stuff didn't exist even 5
years ago, let alone when I came out of school! It's not a major problem for
me because I love learning new stuff anyway, but I have seen other people drop
out of the industry because they only started in it for the paycheck.

~~~
tomjen3
I am not so sure. I too develop in Javascript and it seems to me that most of
the patterns used were carried over from the gang of four (with a few updates,
since Javascript is nominally a functional programming language) which is well
known in the Java community, but was originally written for C++ (or
smalltalk).

So sure something have to change, but retooling does not take nearly as long
as it took to learn to program in the first place.

~~~
jakejake
You definitely don't start from zero each time, that's true. I still use
things that I learned when coding in Pascal. Concepts of linked lists,
recursion, etc.

But consider this - when I started programming there was no such thing as the
web! There was no browser, no javascript. Yet I make my living right now
developing for all of those technologies.

I was thinking technology was stabilizing a bit, but then all of a sudden
mobile comes along! It seems like every 5 years there's some major game-
changer.

You have to really love this industry to keep up!

~~~
tomjen3
But mobile programming isn't that different from desktop programming -- true
you have a smaller screen and the APIs are a little different and you can't
use the mouse but at the same time you use the same concepts you had on the
desktop and the smart-phone is basically an old computer with a touch-screen
and GPS...

------
pinaceae
funny how a lot of techies here say, just re-learn every few years and you'll
have no problems as you get older.

bullshit.

nobody hires a 55 year old javascript coder. i mean, just look at the usual
suspects here on hackernews. look around you.

and this is not about skills. but about money, plain and simple. if you've
been working for 25 years, your salary demands have risen. at least that is
what _everyone_ assumes. so congrats on submitting your resume, but you'll get
filtered out right away cause younger people are _cheaper_ , with the same
skill set.

but isn't there added value in the wisdom that age brings? sure. but where is
this a criterium? does a job posting for an experienced java coder mean that
you should have been in the industry for at least 15 years? of course not.

if you're reaching 50 in technology, you need to find an exit scenario.
government, management, teaching.

~~~
carsongross
Tech careers continue to be remarkably short: 10 years or less if I remember
correctly, which is crazy given how much fun programming inherently is. But
people aren't stupid and often see the writing on the wall: if you want the
big bucks, outside of either being a founder or a Very Special Person at a few
Very Special Companies, you have to start managing and playing the political
game.

I blame this for the inherent cyclical nature of technology: young kids with
no experience come in, get whipped into a frenzy over some technology we've
been over before (see Node.js/cooperative multitasking) and then slowly learn
the shortcomings of that approach, just in time for the next snake oil to hit.

The irony is that I think that as technology continues to knock down the
amount of developers necessary for a given project, older developers who know
how to get from point A to point B with the minimal amount of effort will
become more valuable in relative terms, so long as they can avoid getting
ground down and stay productive. Couple that with another controversial
observation of mine: that _theoretical_ technological progress has slowed
dramatically in the last decade (implementations are still catching up, but
are getting there), and I think we will see small, elite teams of experienced
developers become a preferred (or at least common) way to build software.

That's self serving, of course (I'm 35) but I do think it is true.

~~~
beachgeek
I disagree with your statement about "start managing and playing the political
game".

In my group at BigCo which just got canned, the overly political managers with
no skills who ruined the product due to their gross incompetence are the ones
who have no chance of finding another gig. I feel kind of bad for them, but
I'm pretty sure I'll get over it quickly.

Its critical to keep your skills current.

~~~
carsongross
Gross incompetence sometimes kills. Sometimes it doesn't.

I've seen grossly incompetent sharks move up fine at BigCo.

I agree 100% on your last comment, although I think it's worth being a bit
skeptical towards flashy new stuff.

------
LVB
At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding
experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to
(and do) maintain my skills, and really don't see myself morphing into the old
fuddy-duddy (completely not my nature, and even my youngest colleagues agree).

That said, there are some significant life-style challenges that work against
simply keeping one's skills sharp. Out of college I wanted to change the
world, had all to gain and nothing to lose, just moved and had no family
obligations, was surrounded by likewise eager entrepreneurs who were plugged
into technology, and I could spend all day and night burrowing into whatever
the latest thing was. In short, I could easily commit the vast amount of my
time to tech and was naturally on top of things.

Not so today! Wife, kids, and a mortgage means drastically reduced time for
such endeavors, and a much greater responsibility to provide a stable income
(hopefully with benefits too). Add to that, I'm not hanging out in bars after
work surrounded by other sources of tech insight, which was always a great way
to learn of new things and get a feel for where things are heading. Instead,
I'm heading home, because there are a lot of non-tech things to take care of.

This doesn't mean I throw in the towel. I carve out time where I can and work
my ass off to stay abreast of changing technology, including working on side
projects for more real-world practice. I burn some of my much-valued vacation
time to get to a conference each year. And I'm cool with the way things are
going. But I'm also realistic... Am I going to be burning whole weekends in 48
hour hackathons? Not likely, and least in my situation. I had to come to terms
with the fact that I couldn't emulate the behavior of an early 20's developer
in Silicon Valley. But I can do things that I think keep me reasonably useful
to employers. Most important: this is not at all due to age, but rather due to
life circumstances that often come with getting older.

When I'm 45 or 50, I will not be the genius who is cranking out the next
Node.js in a weekend, but I highly doubt I'll be sitting at city hall waiting
for f*cking Promatch to find me a job either.

~~~
velshin
Well said.

------
tom_b
Fuck this.

I think the real danger is being the 12-year master of TPF reports at BigCorp,
Inc. How do you spin 20 years at BigCorp in an increasingly non-technical role
over that time window in a way that would actually excite Google or Facebook?

I think the norm for those of us who want to stay technically relevant is to
be open to re-inventing our hacker skills, master the linking of our efforts
to bottom-line results, and the wisdom to know when the time has come to
tackle new tech stacks and projects.

~~~
spitfire
Simple: Experience.

With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no
matter how attractive they are initially.

Also, math and analysis skills never go out of style. The fact is, the
technology industry does not value experience it values novelty. Try asking a
rails dev what a taylor series is sometime.

I'll take the guy with deep experience and analytical skills and self
awareness but just a little $cooltech exposure any day.

~~~
steve-howard
How much programming requires you to know about Taylor series? I think they're
nifty, but not very relevant to most work. I sort of agree with you that
experience matters, but I'm not so sure math is useful unless you're writing
programs for scientific computing or you want to be a professor.

~~~
moultano
That's self-fulfilling. Math lets you solve problems that you wouldn't even
have though of as problems before. If you don't know the math, your brain
skips over them as a fact of life rather than as something with a solution.

Programming doesn't require math because programmers don't necessarily know
math, not because the opportunity isn't there.

------
russell
When I was 35 and quit my job to start a start-up, my mother told me not to to
do that because I was too old to get another job. Three decades later I'm
doing fine.

------
nhebb
The key point is that Silicon Valley has changed from a hardware hub to a
software hub. This isn't about programmers who haven't kept their skills
relevant. It's more about hardware design engineers and manufacturing
personnel whose jobs have left the area (and the country).

~~~
shareme
What the article fails to mention is that there is a hiring boom for hardware
designers in Texas.

------
tlogan
In early 2000s, Silicon Valley was changed from a hardware hub (HP, IBM, etc.)
to a software hub (Oracle, Informatica, Google, etc.).

And now it is changing from software hub to "social networking" + "new
business models" hub which unfortunately do not require hard core engineering
skills. For example web design skills are very much in demand.

I'm in 40s, and I wanted to move from my corporate job to something like start
up I found out that majority of jobs in new startups are to get young people
(so called talents) to work on simple applications for under-market wage
(wages which are ok if you don't have any dependents) with benefits and
"culture" intentionally set up to attract only young people.

------
jedberg
This happened to my Dad. At 61, he has a long resume of experience, but it is
experience in a lot of old technologies. He finally solved the problem though,
by moving out of state.

Last month, my Dad, a native a Los Angeles who has lived there his entire
life, moved to Iowa. He basically had to find a company that was still running
on old technology that actually respected experience.

~~~
mathattack
Speaking from experience, they don't pay as well in Iowa as the coasts, but it
is possible to find a job if you'll move to where they are. To generalize
about the midwest, you have a lot of people who still spend their life at one
company, and do respect the simpler work histories.

~~~
jedberg
They don't pay as well in Iowa, but then again, the cost of living is a _lot_
less.

~~~
mathattack
Indeed - it's a big tradeoff. It's probably 1/2 the cost of either coast, and
you can send your kids to public schools without worrying about them getting
mugged. But it speaks to the culture when cities brag about being, "Just 4
hours from Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha and St. Louis"

A definite trade-off.

------
pnathan
After a while, people get into their groove and don't want to get out. If the
groove became a dead end in hiring, then they are in trouble when they next
look for work.

It shows up with older people because as you get more experienced (ie, older),
you have a better change of having found your groove.

I think continual learning is the only way to avoid this problem.

edit:

Also, after you've seen a few crunches for no good reason, you just don't want
to be all eager beaver and work overtime without having a sound reason up
front. So I think that turns off employers as well... rather pay someone cheap
who works overtime than the expensive guy who laughs at the hopeless schedule.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree with you that continual learning is a requirement for managing a
career or calling. I am now 60 and I still get a more than enough work offers
but I find that I am spending a larger fraction of my time in learning
activities than I used to. Twenty years ago I probably averaged 5 or 6 hours a
week doing technical reading and coding experiments; now I easily spend 10 to
15 hours a week in learning activities. Part of this re-emphasis is because I
enjoy learning new things and part is because this effort is required to keep
getting interesting work that I enjoy. Also, as I get older, I have no
interest at all in management or team leadership. I just want to design and
write code.

Another thing that is almost as important as continual learning is what I
would call "ego management." Most of us with decades of experience have had
some spectacular successes in our careers but these are simply not relevant
now. Live in the moment. I think that it is important to appreciate how much
young people bring to the game in terms of entrepreneurship, creativity and
job skills. I have no problems reducing my rates (inflation adjusted) as I get
older to be in alignment with my current market value. I have an old friend
who is not willing to do this, keeps his rates at very high levels, and gets
no work. I have stopped talking to him about how much fun I have working.

------
devs1010
From what this sounds like, its not their age its their skillset, they have a
skillset that has become more and more obsolete and haven't adapted. At my
current job there are guys well over 35 who used to work in jobs like what
they are describing in the article (semiconducator companies, etc) but they
have since adapted and developed new skills relating to web programming, I
don't think the way they are portraying this is entirely accurate.

------
RandallBrown
Of course you're not going to get a job writing assembly, if that's really all
you can/are willing to do you probably aren't the type of person I'd want to
hire, even if the job was to write assembly.

I'm 24 and work with plenty of older guys. One of them always makes fun of us
mac developers because he was writing mac software before we were born and OS
X isn't a "real" mac. He doesn't sit around complaining about the good old
days of assembly, he learns new things. His experience follows the tech
industry pretty closely as it moved from assembly to c to c++, etc. Now he
writes Android apps.

The point is that older guys only become irrelevant by choice. Programming is
an industry with almost no up front cost to get started on. Anyone with a
computer can do it. Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why
don't they brush up on their development skills and learn something new?

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
"Instead of these guys going to town hall meetings, why don't they brush up on
their development skills and learn something new?"

If those specific unemployed people all went home and learned Android
development, most of them still wouldn't be hired, anywhere, not in tech
(because they're old and unemployed) and not in "survival" jobs (because
they're old, and they'll leave when they find something better). They're
garbage as far as the economy is concerned. That the practice of refusing to
consider unemployed people for hiring is common enough to warrant discussion
partially supports that.

~~~
RandallBrown
Just add the "freelancer" line to your resume and voila, you've no longer been
unemployed for a few years. This also assumes that you've been doing something
that could qualify as freelancing like working on some phone apps or a website
or something.

If you've been sitting on your ass for 2 years, yeah it's going to look pretty
bad to employers.

~~~
keithpeter
This works outside the computer related industry as well. I was made redundant
from a managerial job in teaching. I did some authoring of e-learning
materials, did some sessional work (fee paid teaching) for a couple of local
institutions, then found a salaried job within six months. At no time was I
officially unemployed. My CV is seamless.

------
lrobb
I can never resist... From a recruiter I know:

"A doctor, a lawyer and an Accountant with 30 years experience is probably a
semi-reitred millionaire. A software engineer with 30 years experience is
probably out of work." Or doing an hourly contract to keep some money coming
in.

------
dkrich
I would be very careful about applying generalizations here. This article is
very vague about what constitutes an "advanced degree in engineering" and
exactly what "a decade of experience in the technology sector" means.

Not all employees are created equal and this type of study smacks of a certain
statistical bias- ie, only the least qualified workers (those lacking the
desired skillsets and experience, preferred degrees, etc.) will be the one's
out of work. Therefore, to take those who are struggling to find work and
project that onto the industry as a whole is to take a fairly protracted view
of a complex situation. I'm not saying that the author's proposed explanation
is impossible, just that it is only one of many plausible explanations, and
without more information it would be a mistake to take any firm conclusions
from this.

~~~
greenyoda
The other obvious statistical bias is that the article is only covering
Silicon Valley, which is hardly the entire tech industry.

------
spudlyo
_“Especially in social media, cloud computing and mobile apps, if you’re over
40 you’re perceived to be over the hill,” Ms. Stadelman said._

Just as a counterpoint, I recently joined the ranks of a large social media
company and was surprised to discover that 3/6 of the folks on the database
engineering team (mysqlf included) are over 40, and all but one person is over
30.

~~~
pradocchia
Database engineering is serious business, and pretty staid, NoSQL
notwithstanding.

~~~
wavetossed
NoSQL is also pretty serious business because what you are doing is
deconstructing the relational database and assembling the bits that do the job
that you need. A lot of NoSQL tools are marketed as doing far more than they
really are capable of and you need real skills and knowledge of database
internals to be able to navigate this treacherous area.

That's why you see so many blogs about companies changing core NoSQL
technologies.

------
benmathes
Learn new tools every few years.

Focus on learning tool-agnostic things like how to build abstractions, working
well in a team, coding processes, run-time complexity, and tool-agnostic
concepts like closures/monads/etc.

------
CCs
The age has nothing to do with it. It is all about accomplishments.

Some people would have no problem getting hired. Think of Peter Norvig (56),
Larry Wall (57), Guido van Rossum (55), Linus Torvalds (42).

And you don't have to be this famous. Ex. publish a good iPhone app on GitHub,
offers will start to flow in.

~~~
ootachi
None of those people are employable, except as vanity hires at companies like
Google. Think about it -- why would it be in a company's best interests to
hire Linus Torvalds? They can get the kernel for free.

~~~
greenyoda
They'd be interested in hiring Linus because he's a very smart and resourceful
guy who can communicate well and knows a lot about hardware and software and
how to manage a large development project.

------
SethMurphy
It's simple: build something relevant or at least interesting. If you can do
this you probably don't need a job. The bottom line is tech is for people
obsessed with learning and creating. For many people, with age those obsession
wear thin as the hair on their head.

------
brador
The key point with tech is age matters little.

If you have the skills, you'll have no trouble getting work.

Yes, ageism is a slight problem of course, as with every profession, but
programming is more a meritocracy than most other professions. Keep the skills
sharp and relevant and you'll have few worries.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I'm curious where your evidence that there is only a slight ageism problem in
tech. I think it is more prevelant than you are implying. I agree that keeping
skills sharp is important, but I have seen where older people are _assumed_ to
be behind the curve, regardless of the value of wisdom gained through
experience; where younger people are _assumed_ to be ahead of the curve,
regardless of the lack of any real experience.

The ageism is subtle, but, as such, it has an equally pernicious effect on
hiring.

------
lrobb
Related: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-
valley%E2%80%99s-da...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-
valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/)

------
toadi
Being 35 this news makes me a scared old man who maybe won't get hired again
;)

~~~
tony_vivaldi
I was laid off a year ago at age 37 and have not been able to get a job since,
or even get many interviews. I think at this point I've applied to 77 jobs,
heard back from 11, and have actually been phone screened by 5.

Most of my experience is in relatively "hot" technology at startups... I have
three Rails sites I can point to and worked on an iPhone app with 3 million
users, with a node.js and Redis backend. I have a github account. I've solved
programming challenges from Facebook, interview street, spotify, etc. I don't
think I'm a total slouch, and I've worked with guys FAR worse than I am. It's
pretty painful to think about some of the duds that are still employed while I
can't even get an interview.

People prescribe keeping skills relevant, but focusing on latest technologies
can be a mistake. If I had more experience with Microsoft tech or J2EE I could
probably pick up a boring job doing enterprise stuff somewhere in the midwest.

I thought I could always just pick up a job through my network, but a lot of
guys my age who were friends at other companies are sort of checked out and
are not in a position to hire. The younger guys I met I think just don't want
to pull me in because they have plenty of younger friends they could hire
first. A lot of tech hiring, especially at the startup level, is hiring guys
that you want to be bros with. Generally, you aren't bros with guys 10 or 15
years older than you are.

I never thought I'd be one of the guys in the articles like this, so I'm not
sure exactly what to do. I've been working on iPhone apps in my spare time,
but at some point I am going to run out of money. It can get very depressing
and does quite a number on one's mental health. You feel like you can't
socialize because you should be looking for work, and not spending money. Your
extended family and friends kind of abandon you because they think something
must be wrong with you (maybe there is?). This anxiety and isolation makes it
pretty hard to focus and I've been considering trying anti-depressant
medications, just so I can finish off my apps. However, I have diminished
confidence at this point that having finished iPhone apps will get me any
money, or another job. I often feel like I should just stop wasting my time
and try to get some sort of dangerous but high paying labor job, like an oil
roughneck. Or maybe just move to some cheap developing nation and become some
sort of ex-pat weirdo guy?

Another aspect of this, is that it seems kind of weird to even get a job
stocking shelves at target, or something. Would they even hire me? Would it be
worth it to make the 1400 a month?

I now have a lot of sympathy for the "99%" type people. Those Seth Godin and
Friedman pieces about the new economy being no place for average workers are
pretty much correct. I wouldn't say I'm a C player but I'd say I'm around a
B+. Unfortunately, B+ and 35 or above computer programmer doesn't seem to cut
it.

P.S. if anyone has any advice it would be pretty helpful to me and maybe
others

~~~
ootachi
Listen to this man. This is the fate of everyone on this site. If you think
you're exempt because you're awesome, I'm talking most of all to you.

Get out of the tech industry while you still can. There are no jobs in this
industry for anyone, even the skilled.

~~~
jerf
This is an absolutely bizarre claim in light of the fact that the tech
industry is the only one in a hiring frenzy through an economy so weak that
historians may well end up calling it the second Great Depression, and that
programmers are just about the only people left who have a plausible
explanation for how robots won't simply take their jobs in 30 years. (Or
perhaps rather, the potent combo of robots _and their programmers_.)

I'm in this industry and staying because I'm willing to bet with my feet that
you're not just wrong, you're _dead_ wrong. To my mind, the question is what
the _non_ -tech jobs will be in 20 years.

What do you do? Are you getting out of the tech industry, or merely scoring
cheap social posturing points with some fashionable cynicism? Are you taking
your own advice, or just posting _ad naseum_ with no actual belief behind it?

~~~
ootachi
"Programmers are just about the only people left who have a plausible
explanation for how robots won't simply take their jobs in 30 years."

Unfortunately, they lack a similarly plausible explanation for how cheap
offshore labor won't simply take their jobs in fewer than 30 years.

~~~
jerf
Sure there is; economics 101. Offshore labor won't be cheaper in 30 years.

In fact the economic advantage has already largely dissipated and it's
_already_ not cheaper, which is why you don't hear anybody talking about this
anymore. The whole "we're all gonna lose our tech jobs to the cheap
foreigners" scare is all very 2008; it has failed to happen, and it will
continue to fail to happen because equilibrium has been reached and will not
rapidly change because there's few to no new markets to suddenly emerge.

Sadly, very few people actually understand economics 101 and simply can't deal
with the fact that prices react to things rather than staying static forever.

I also observe your uncareful dodge around my questions. May I simply assume
the worst, then?

~~~
ootachi
"In fact the economic advantage has already largely dissipated and it's
already not cheaper, which is why you don't hear anybody talking about this
anymore. The whole "we're all gonna lose our tech jobs to the cheap
foreigners" scare is all very 2008; it has failed to happen, and it will
continue to fail to happen because equilibrium has been reached and will not
rapidly change because there's few to no new markets to suddenly emerge."

Wrong. Yahoo!, for example, has been continuously shedding Bay Area jobs and
moving them to Bangalore. Right now, in 2011/2012, they are laying off workers
in Silicon Valley and hiring in India. Expect other companies to follow suit.

It is certainly much cheaper to hire in India. Depending on experience, you
can get three to five programmers there for every one in the Bay Area. They're
just as skilled.

~~~
jerf
So what are you doing about it?

------
hexis
You can always interpret bad hiring practices as damage and route around them.
My wife and I run our own tech business and I don't think any of our customers
ever has or ever will care how old we are.

------
lcargill99
Lastday, Capricorn 29's. Year of the City: 2274. Carousel begins...

------
brianm
Frankly, if there are a lot of older folks (40 is older? I am in deep, deep
trouble) with lots of experience having trouble finding jobs, then this is a
ripe market to recruit from.

Of course, I have a funny perspective -- I work with a guy who wrote compilers
for Symbolics, and another who started programming before I was born (and I am
in the supposedly-being-age-discriminated-against category). Between the two
of them, and two more folks my own tender middle-age, they are the most
productive, awesome folks I know and hope to keep working with for a long time
to come.

Seriously, if this _is_ reality then start recruiting "old folks" -- you now
have an unfair advantage in terms of recruiting.

------
temphn
Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have
fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of
college. This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack
didn't change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for
more.

No doubt there are many who'll argue with these facts. The last time this came
up, a guy piped up saying that he'd hire a smart old programmer any day over a
dumb young'un who knew node or Rails. That guy was advertising for a Rails dev
in his profile.

The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or
company powered by older engineers. Note that discriminating against Jewish,
Persian, Chinese, Korean, or Indian programmers would obviously lose you
money, as those groups constitute a substantial fraction of the tech
workforce. It is not so obvious that the market is economically irrational
about the abilities of other groups.

(Also: note how the article and the engineers all want to work at the best
companies, and turn their noses up at the non-Facebooks and non-Googles they
might need to "settle" for. What if employees couldn't freely discriminate
regarding where they want to work? Does anyone stop to think that the
companies they want to join so badly might know a thing or two about what
kinds of people make good programmers?)

~~~
amcintyre
_Older engineers tend to want more money and more seniority. Yet they have
fewer skills and can't/don't want to work as hard as kids fresh out of
college._

Nice generalization. Personally, over the last few years I've run into lots of
"kids fresh out of college" that can't/won't work to learn skills they need to
do their job. Game devs that don't know the math behind changing coordinate
systems, and consequently write fragile rendering/UI code. Testers that won't
write unit tests, and devs that won't write and/or run them to avoid creating
new bugs. Early-career C++ coders that will argue to you that the OS won't let
two threads touch a static variable at the same time.

But I don't generalize that into assuming every young person is a lazy moron.
I've also met some bright young people that will work hard to learn new
theory/skills/languages/frameworks, and care about doing a good job. So I
prefer to evaluate each person on their own merits, and that seems to work out
a lot better. YMMV.

If a company isn't interested in hiring me because they're afraid I have
enough experience to know better than to work 80-hour weeks and take my work
home for 50-75% of industry pay while making them rich, that's ok with me.
I've got that T-shirt, and I don't want another one.

 _This is a change from historical times, in which the technology stack didn't
change multiple times in a generation and wisdom/experience counted for more._

If simply learning the top of the latest tech stack every few years is making
you a lot of money right now, you'd better start saving. I'm thinking
something like this: <http://www.despair.com/motivation.html>

_The best way to show this isn't true is for someone to build a startup or
company powered by older engineers._

Most people that are so inclined would rather start the company and power it
with younger, more fungible people that don't know their own value. ;)

Seriously, though, aren't most startup founders 40+ already?

~~~
ootachi
Nope. In fact, many VCs (Khosla, etc) are quite open about the fact that they
are unlikely to fund you if you are over 25.

~~~
helmut_hed
I don't know what Vinod Khosla has recently said regarding his preferences for
founder age, but his firm's recent track record of funding is public
knowledge. Here's the last three fundings listed on Kleiner Perkins' website:

1) 2012-01-24 Elance, CEO Fabio Rosati, age not listed but he "has 20 years of
experience in the services and technology sectors", so likely late 30's at the
youngest.

2) 2012-01-17 AppDynamics, CEO Jyoti Bansal, age not listed but BS from IIT in
1999 so probably around 30

3) 2012-01-10 Klout, CEO Joe Fernandez, graduated with double major in CS and
finance 2000 so also about 30

I'd be interested to know where the anecdote about not funding people over 25
came from.

~~~
ootachi
Khosla didn't say 25, my mistake -- he said 35:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-
ca...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-case-for-old-
entrepreneurs/2011/12/02/gIQAulJ3KO_story.html)

The 25 quote comes from an unnamed VC quoted by Michael Arrington in this
story: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/30/internet-entrepreneurs-
are-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/30/internet-entrepreneurs-are-like-
professional-athletes-they-peak-around-25/)

------
B0Z
This is just the way it is. Deal with it! Get in the game or GTFO the field.

Sure, having the fire in your belly can mitigate much if not most of the
"crochety" factor as can staying on the bleeding edge of coding and problem
solving. But... if <insert random industry> didn't do this, if the biggest
worry was keeping the old farts employed and coddling their irrelevance,
<insert random industry> would _NEVER_ progress. The US would be last in the
world for meaningful product or service disruptions that every other country
strives for.

Again, at 42 with 16 years in technology, I'm one of the old farts. Skills
that once got me the coveted double eyebrow raise and an extra digit on my
bonus check, now get me the loathed single eyebrow raise and a comfy slot on
the next RIF list.

The union between a company and its employee base can be compared to a
youthful first marriage between 20-somethings. Almost as soon as you say "I
do", subconsciously, your will and desire to improve, to change, to grow
starts to decline. You get fat. Your spouse gets fat. You gradually stop going
out with friends or trying new things. Squirt out a couple of pups and you can
pretty much write the excuses for why you can't do "this" or "that" in stone.

The world is dynamic and the Indians, the Chinese, the South Americans, the
Koreans, the Russians, pick your own example -- all of them -- understand this
as a simple fact of life. From the moment they wake in the morning to the
second their head hits the dirt floor at night, they are mentally and
emotionally pounded with the relentless concept that they are NOT in first
place. They are NOT the leader. They have miles and miles and miles to go
before they can even begin to break into the same stratosphere of
"advancement" that Westernized nations have taken for granted for the last 100
years. We provide for them a marker. A goal. A far-off, seemingly impossible
to reach objective of what is possible when you push yourselves to limits you
never knew you were capable of conquering.

So, no. I don't feel sorry for the elder statesmen of <insert random
industry>, and I'm even one of them. The very second I see my career plight as
someone else's fault or the responsibility of something I can't control, I
have already lost. I might as well close up shop and get my blue Wal-Mart vest
on. Start practicing "would you like fry's with that". No. My position in
technology is my responsibility. My relevance in comparison with you wiry
fuckers 25 years my junior is 120% totally and without question not only my
own responsibility, but my own _choice_. The truth is, if given even
moderately comparable skills to you young lads on an interview, I have a leg
up. I can run circles around the kids who still rent apartments and are still
making payments on their first car. I have the benefit of patience that you
only get from trying to do the same thing over and over 1000 times. I am more
forward thinking, maybe not in terms of what the next Google is going to be,
but in terms of execution, I can see things down the road that the
whippersnappers can't see -- because they're not old enough to have seen the
writing on the wall before.

No. I am old (in Internet years), but I am not a victim. And when industry
moves forward without me, the blame lies on me and _MY_ decision to keep up.
You young kids do have your uses though. You keep me and my ilk on our toes
and are anything but shy about how fast and nimble I have to be to keep up.

~~~
cafard
"he world is dynamic and the Indians, the Chinese, the South Americans, the
Koreans, the Russians, pick your own example -- all of them -- understand this
as a simple fact of life. From the moment they wake in the morning to the
second their head hits the dirt floor at night, they are mentally and
emotionally pounded with the relentless concept that they are NOT in first
place."

a) Isn't this a couple of billion people to make a sweeping generalization
about? b) 'stratosphere of "advancement" that Westernized nations have taken
for granted the past 100 years' is a very curious notion. Is South Korea
really not at the industrial level of Pittsburgh, 1912? Has Russia, which has
continuously been one of the great powers since about 1750, regressed that
thoroughly?

~~~
Elepsis
I think you're missing the point by taking the 100-year number literally.
Don't compare the Korea of today to Pittsburgh in 1912. Rather, note the
difference between Pittsburgh in 1912 and Korea in 1912, and observe that in
many ways the U.S. (and other Western nations) has been consistently ahead, by
some varying but ever-present margin, for pretty much the entirety of that
duration. There's no reason that won't change over time, and the fire in the
bellies of the people in the other countries to become the best in the world
is what will make it happen.

------
mahyarm
The place I work at has a majority of 30 somethings and 40 somethings. We do
C++/C & various mobile platforms.

------
jfoutz
Ah, the tech industry. 45 is old.

~~~
raganwald
Raganwald turns fifty this year. That’s “grandpa old.” The trouble with being
40+ is that "I’m not young enough to know everything,” as Oscar Wilde quipped.

------
theDaveB
Am 42 and went into software development at 15. I didn't really finish school
and managed to land a job as a trainee programmer (told the company I was
basically finished at school but had to back for my exams, I never did).

I never really learnt new skills much after VB 6 (missed the whole .net
thing), I got sick of having to learn new stuff every few years. I was a MCSD
but that was nothing, read a book, sit a exam.

I left IT and took up photography for a few years, tried to get back in and
have never had a interview.

I am now doing the odd website for friends and trying to make my first iPad
App.

Dave

------
wavephorm
I bet there's a pile of 20 year olds with some jQuery and Rails under their
belt, consider themselves a ninja rockstar, and this scenario won't happen to
them cause jQuery rocks, and rails will be around forever and ever...

Guess what... you'll all be out of work in 10 years unless you work your ass
off to keep up. The computing world is changing faster than I ever remember.
We are entering a new computing paradigm faster than most people will be able
to upgrade their skills. If you aren't hacking your iPad, and you don't build
mobile apps, have no NLP or machine learning experience, and you aren't
hacking away at Kinect in your spare time, then your livelihood is gravely in
danger.

Welcome to the game.

------
ahoyhere
Part of it is the older workers in question have outdated skills and probably
act like "fuddy-duddies." I've worked with great tech types in their 40s plus,
who are smart and present and current as well as wise and experienced…

and I've worked with terrible ones who bellow like angry walruses (AGRGRAGRAH)
and declare things to be done which are impossible. Including one who fell
asleep in a meeting with our mutual client, snoring with his subnotebook on
his belly, then woke up long enough to demand I make it so the web site
"copied the data to the email in a table" when somebody dragged a "picture"
from "The browser to email". After back and forths of me explaining that it
couldn't be done, he eventually demanded, "WHY NOT?" and I, exasperated and
having exhausted all my other explanations, said, "Because the internet
doesn't work that way."

And yet, one of us got hired as CTO and the other got fired from the project.
(Hint: the young person got fired.)

I think that in this, as with all questions of _skill_ and _desirability_ ,
the answer probably lies more in the worker themselves than the outside
environment.

That said, many of these companies want green young people because they will
work for peanuts, can be manipulated, and don't know any better. Older workers
tend to have a better sense of self, perspective, the need for work-life
balance (because they have families, etc) and are less likely to sleep under
their desk. This is the money line:

"Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site
LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr.
Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from
the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities."

So is this:

'Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook,
said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on
the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.”'

This is code for: you have some skillz but no actual prospects (or you
wouldn't want to work for us), so we'll label you "entrepreneurial" so you
feel good about coming and working for the man right out of college, and we'll
squeeze & overwork you as long as you don't realize that it doesn't have to be
this way.

