From my personal experience, I disagree completely with the advice that "non-youngsters" switching careers to software development should aim for "non-fashionable" tech.
I started to learn software development at 37 years old (shoutout to freeCodeCamp.org!). That was in 2017. I went the frontend route, so I naturally started with html, css, and javascript. Then, since React was already the most popular framework then, I started to learn it and build projects solely on React. I skipped Jquery, pre-ES5 javascript, and things like that. I focused on what was fashionable.
It turned out great for me! I am a very happy and successful (in financial terms compared to what I earned early or expected to earn these days) web developer.
Funny enough, my first job was using Ember. But six months in, the company decided to migrate to React, since it was getting harder and harder to hire people that wanted to work with Ember. Then a couple of React jobs. And now I started a job using Vue. So still learning fashionable things.
Btw, I never noticed ageism against me. I worked on a big Brazilian startup and then on three small American startups. Of course, plenty of the jobs that I applied for and didn't get could be because of ageism, I'll never know, but I consider myself to be successful in getting jobs, so at least I think it is not something that affected the general outcome of my career.
I'm a front end developer for 15 years, same age as you. I'm looking to leave the industry, so I kind of agree with the author. It's a matter of perspective I guess.
I just feel this field has become incredibly over saturated and it's now a race to the bottom.
I felt the same way, but then I learnt a niche programming language (Clojure), and get to do front-end work for double the salary, with far less competition, and I quite enjoy programming again. Not saying it will work for you, but worth a thought!
But you mentioned you work for American startup, presumably they are outsourcing? Guessing the salary is not the same as they would pay in mainland US (could be wrong).
the role of front end developer has become incredibly commoditised. I currently work for faang and I gave up applying for jobs because nobody replies. I just wait for recruiters to contact me.
The "shortage" of medical professionals - esp. doctors - I believe is a manufactured one. The medical associations and societies that control approvals operate in a manner similar to OPEC. They keep supply down to keep prices high. This is almost a scam, given the lengthy wait times for doc appointments in many urban areas.
Startups are not typically picky about hiring, in fact they have a major financial incentive to be anti-ageist. The problem is.. when the market tanks and startups go bust, it doesn't look so rosy anymore.
Which is why the most coveted positions in this field are in a few corporations that pay top dollar. Getting hired there is a different story in terms of barrier to entry and competition you will face including ageism which is unfortunately very much present.
So for someone non-young who looks at his future 10-20 years and tries to calculate risk, startups should not be taken into account. If one can't get a job at the top corps, one shouldn't enter the field. The risk is just too much.
> ” If one can't get a job at the top corps, one shouldn't enter the field. The risk is just too much”
What?? I think I never read anything in HN that I disagree more with.
I got fired December 1st last year because the company I worked was heading to an IPO and decided that they didn’t want to work with full time contractors from outside the USA anymore. I got paid the whole December month. I started in a new job in January 18th.
Being a good frontend developer is what minimizes the risk of my career, not working on companies that will exist in 20 years. I doubt a lot that I will be working in the same company that I am now in 10 years.
First off, I wouldn't work for "one of the top corps", being FAANG companies. The work life balance is terrible. Find a company that does it's own business and wants to hire their own developers.
How do you expect to get into the field, not just graduating college with a CS degree? Your advice is like a self fulfilling prophecy. Go work at a startup. You'll learn tons. Sure, job security won't be as good as an established company, but the barrier to entry isn't either.
Your mileage can certainly vary with work-life-balance in FAANGs - I've been at Alphabet for almost 7 years and I've had great WLB. It's something you have to do deliberately, though; especially with distributed teams, there's always going to be emails coming in, chats to read, documents and CLs to review, etc. If you're someone who tends towards workaholism you may need to set some boundaries in your life.
I'm not saying this is universally true at Alphabet, as there are definitely groups that don't do a good job of this, but it's very doable.
That may still work when someone is in his 20s. For someone in mid-30s/early 40s, it's too much of a gamble, especially if one has a family to support.
One starting from zero doesn't gain deep expertise in anything in a startup in the span of a few years. As long as the market is breaking one record after another and money is raining from the skies, this is not a problem. But it's an illusion and like all illusions, eventually will collapse. And when it does, you're at the bottom of the totem pole and as expendable as one can be. And this doesn't even take into account technological progress that is rapidly obsoleting many of these low-barrier-to-entry jobs.
You don’t manage risk in your career by worrying about the company. You manage risk by making sure you have a marketable skillset, an updated resume, an updated “career document”, and having savings.
If you count on your company to never lay you off, you end up like old IBMers who got complacent, found they didn’t have a marketable skillset and when they got laid off and couldn’t find a job, they complained about “ageism”.
Maintaining and extending legacy code is, in many ways, orthogonal to its underlying language.
You can make a 2x2 matrix with "legacy code quality" on one axis, and "language percieved desireability" on the other axis.
You can make truckloads of money, earn much respect, with nearly zero negative ageism, in at least one of those quadrants.
"Building new" versus "maintaining existing" are different mindsets, and often a choice.
For older people just getting started, "maintaining existing" is often the wiser first decision. From there, the particular mix of language and tech stack count, and often the more obscure the better.
I don't want to toot my own horn, but I wrote a blog post about being a niche programmer that you may or may not find useful: https://ano.ee/blog/the-niche-programmer
Every time I've gone looking for COBOL jobs on job sites out of curiosity I always see them paying pretty poorly.
On Glassdoor for Cobol [0] the standard range is $54k to $179k (presumably in NYC metro where I am) with a reported maximum of $306k. The standard range for React [1] is $49k to $257k with a reported maximum of $550k.
I'm not saying Glassdoor is perfect but better to have these discussions based on some measured data than just common mantra that legacy is boring but pays better.
Those are only public bids, and not everything goes through public channels.
Companies working with COBOL (or things like AS400) do so because they've been using it for some time already.
So they mostly already know the networks of professionals they will hire for the job, and that's often their own past employees who went freelance, or keep contracting after legal retirement kicks in. Professionals who also act as hiring agents for their replacements.
That's good to know. But for the purposes of people considering a new career wouldn't their position be basically the same as what you see publicly reported on Glassdoor? (assuming there's not some bias like people who use COBOL are less likely to also use Glassdoor and enter salaries there)
If you're starting a new career you wouldn't have a network.
If you're starting a new career, I'm not sure the info you will find on Glassdoor will speak much to you either (or, not as much as when you already have had one or two positions - because then you know how to interpret some signals companies broadcast through their ads, or their employees reports).
And looking after COBOL (or an old tech, without having been introduced to it before) as an entry job is a bit peculiar.
Better looking after the companies that still need it, understanding why, and then going through them for specific jobs, linked or not to COBOL.
I understand the appeal of getting into it for the technology or the money, but getting into it for the problems and how to solve them first will open many more paths (and as much if not more money).
How many of those React jobs include RSUs from privately owned companies? I would venture that approximately 100% of the COBOL jobs that's all cash compensation/salary.
Why is that a bad thing to offer all cash? Equity from private companies is statistically worthless. I wouldn’t even count it as part of my compensation.
I don't think it's a bad thing (quite the opposite) but it's common to take high SV salaries that include hard-to-hit discretionary bonuses and hundreds of thousands in stock, and compare that TC number to the $175k offered by the private company that's also hiring. It's an apples to hammers comparison.
All of the public tech companies that I know about basically guarantee you cash + stock and a known vesting schedule over at least two years. Of course, we are living through the first era where BigTech stocks are tanking left and right.
I just left working at “normal companies” most of my career to work at BigTech two years ago at 46. My base pay was about the same. But my stock/prorated signing bonus brought my total compensation up by around 25%. I can (and do) sell my stock as soon as it vests.
I’m on the low end of BigTech compensation. I work remotely and did a slight career pivot from software engineering.
Yes, I know about the dot com bust. Those weren’t large profitable tech companies and they didn’t have the head count that companies have now
Is there some engineering adjacent job that doesn’t come with a recruiter telling me to grind leetcode for 7-8 weeks for a chance to work on some weirdos space ship finance company? (Only kidding, mostly)
Privately owned companies don't give RSUs normally they do stock options or revenue sharing but yes your point is good.
Startups and public companies both seem to pay better base salary for modern tech developers and also give you equity or profit sharing. Whereas the government or government contractor companies that often stick with old tech (it seems) you'll only get cash.
Banks may be an exception since many do give stock or good bonuses. But I don't often see bank positions looking for COBOL developers.
> Startups and public companies both seem to pay better base salary for modern tech developers and also give you equity or profit sharing.
I've worked for a couple public companies, none of which gave any stock or any profit sharing to the engineering staff. I've also worked for private companies that had some profit sharing but it was never discussed other than "there is profit sharing" even when it was a substantial percentage (one place I consistently got 6-8% of my salary as profit sharing).
More popular lately seems to be the pseudo-bonus-pseudo-profit-share thing where you have a set percentage of your salary as "bonus" but it requires the company overall hitting specific revenue and profit numbers, so it's essentially profit sharing with a cap.
I think my point is comp structures are all over the place, but "large public company giving base, bonus, and stock" is a small minority, while "private company giving base, and maybe a bonus sometimes" is the most common.
> Every time I've gone looking for COBOL jobs on job sites out of curiosity I always see them paying pretty poorly
Sure, but the places known for paying well in the industry are also fairly overtly hostile to late-entrants and non-traditional career paths unless those people have already built a successful business and are getting acquihired.
COBOL devs have been at their same job for 10+ years. So take whatever the average dev wage was 10 years ago, and add 3% raises.
Zip Recruiter puts average salaries at around $88k/yr with the top 10% making over $110k. Payscale puts salaries a little lower than that.
The of the few job postings I see, none have salary information listed -- in my experience, that tends to mean the salaries are low or average. And if you're a COBOL engineer, jobs opportunities are slim, even in a region with a large number of older banks and insurance companies (read: prime COBOL industries). There's like one job each in areas like Omaha, NE; Alpharetta, GA; Montgomery County, AL; Chattanooga, TN; Milan, IL; Feather South, FL; etc. In other words, a bunch of places nobody has ever heard of.
The places that need to replace COBOL devs aging out of the work force with apps still running are among the places least likely to practice age discrimination to start with (and even if they were inclined to, there's not a pipeline of fresh out of college/bootcamp COBOL devs.)
(C#/Java have lots more opportunities at the same type of workplaces, so aren't bad choices but also lots more competition at all experience levels and from more traditional career paths; still, late-entrants with relative domain expertise can be quite competitive with pure programmers.)
> Honestly Go seems to be over its honeymoon period and is probably a safe bet also
This. Go is an established technology by now. Plus, it is really, really easy to learn and get productive in...I mean, being accessible even to beginners was one of the design goals of the language. One can literally get to grips with its basics over a long weekend.
Yes. I was comfortable in Go in about a week. It lets you do most of the things you really need to do in a web backend without too much bother. The language is generally well behaved. There's no framework-of-the-week problem.
JavaScript/TypeScript/Node/React/etc is a treadmill.
There are some great web frameworks out there (gin, mux, echo, etc) but one of Go's strengths is that it's just as easy to stand up a server without them.
I've done some personal projects in Go (golang?) and I respect it as a modern development language.
Rust is on my TODO list to dabble in; at least at a glance the language has a solid conception, a clean syntax for portability, and the language syntax appears to lean towards clarifying much of the undefined behavior optimization other languages get humans into trouble over.
I'd even take mono / C# over Java; but that's just because of the real world enterprise nightmares I've seen... all the fossilized versions of vulnerable libraries everywhere.
How come most people say software devs are in demand and then there is this comment saying he receives 4000+ applications on a job and nobody in Europe should consider this career?
Can perspectives on reality be this far apart, or is he trolling?
They almost always mean “talented/experienced” people are in demand. Not some random who did a bootcamp and watched a few YT videos and can barely copy and paste from stack overflow.
If you actually are talented, and reasonably right for the role: figure out who the hiring manager is and message them on LinkedIn. You don't have to make sure it's the right HM, as long as you're close they'll point you in the right direction.
I've done this many times (before working in big tech) and I have always received a response. There is only 1 company that I've failed to get through for at least some kind of a screen: MSFT. They seem to want nothing to do with me.
I is frustrating from our side too. My boss just sent me a half dozen resumes: they all look the same to me: someone fresh out of a CS degree looking for a job (this is an entry level position so that is what we want). I really don't want to interview 6 people for one position, so who do we call in?
Skilled developers are in demand, but the market is _flooded_ not only with low-barrier-to-entry applicants that can't even do the basics but also beginner programmers with constructed work histories that can masquerade a lot better and as a result require more time to see through and filter. This state of affairs is also rapidly getting worse..
If someone entering the field now has nothing (e.g. CS degree from a good university, high-quality projects), to help him raise above this noise, it's a fool's gamble.
This has been happening to me so much lately. Half the applicants I receive look great on paper and then I realize their only "work" experience are a bunch of "companies" they made up for some side projects. The other half of the people I am not even sure why they are applying as they literally have no idea how to code. I can't imagine what the recruiters are receiving if I am getting the filtered version.
I'm currently trying out whether frontend development could be for me in my mid thirties. I knew that bootcamp marketing and YouTubers were exaggerating when it came to the jobs and their requirements. But I didn't think there would be so much 'noise' indeed.
I guess that means to only go through with it if you are really, really good and actually enjoy doing it. Not because it promises money and job stability.
I'm in my early 50s with a career spanning three decades, worked in fintech, worked in various FAANGs, lived in SV for close to 10 years, lived in NYC for half as long, now semi-retired.
For someone young (early to mid 20s), I agree with what you wrote. Being really, really good and actually enjoying doing it, should be a must.
For someone of your age or older, I see a lot more risk. If you start from zero, it will take you at least 5 years to build up ammunition (a degree from a good university and some demonstrable experience) that's going to open the doors that you need open and give you a shot at passing the entrance tests. And then the "being really, really good" part comes in except you're now 5 years older facing fierce competition and there's no guarantee that you will succeed (who knows what the market will be in 5-10 years, the trajectory doesn't look promising).
Personally, I wouldn't do it. The skills needed to offset the risk are hard to acquire in the timespans we're talking about, unless you're truly exceptional. But offseting the risk for me means living in the US and working at one of the FAANGs (job security and very high total compensation). Others see it differently.
Funny thing is, I considered coding because I didn't see my natural talent as a copywriter (not in english) to be recession proof enough. Then everyone talked about how coders are in such demand etc.
I never stopped to think that tech is an industry like any other. And that when the economy tanks all those start-ups and companies who are willing to gamble on an inexperienced junior dev will behave very differently.
Doesn't speak for my problem solving skills, actually. Lol.
Stuff is screwed up. I applied at over 80 companies last year, got interviews with about 60 of them, did about 110 individual phone screens/interviews. Got no offers. It seems the management paradigm right now for small shops or startups is to dedicate $350k or so per year for developer salaries. A single principle or staff engineer is hired. Takes $150k per year. And they in turn try to shove 4 juniors into the remaining $200k. I'm 40 years old with no lead experience and I'm not a junior. So I fit none of these roles.
Have you been a developer the whole time? ~16-18 YOE with no lead experience could be [incorrectly] taken as a red flag.
I will say we've been trying to hire two seniors for the better part of 6 months and most of the people we end up on the phone with either end up going somewhere (presumably for more $ but it's rare to get a reason), or they do so poorly on the technical screen it makes you wonder if they just used someone else's resume. Nothing in between the two - I've been in my current EM role for probably 3 months, have done maybe 20-25 interviews, and we've extended 4 offers. One accepted then took a different job two days before his start date, one accepted, two declined.
I've been doing some form of development since the age of 28. I look young for my age so I could probably pass for 35. I've made sure nothing giving my true age away is online or on my resume. I think the biggest issue is I have mostly been in the Perl ecosystem and most of those companies are self hosted, not using docker, etc. I do have requirements of only being remote, this worked fine in the perl world. But those jobs are mostly non-existent now and plus I was tired of the mindset that perl software stacks seem to harbor (never updating software, why use a framework when you can cowboy code your own, etc). Spent 2 years playing around with Django, figured it would be an easy transition. Hard to say why I don't get hired. I even did 7 interviews with one company. Several occasions I even celebrated early (buying stuff I didn't need with my dwindling savings account, going out to eat at fancy places with the family, etc) because I had 2 or 3 interviews ongoing and they were going so good and I was such a good match that I just knew I'd get an offer from one. But no... Slowly went from asking $130k per year to $120k, $110k, $90k.. That didn't help, the companies got crappier, the interviews just got longer and harder (the opposite of what I was wanting because I was so burned out by this time). Had a couple of perl companies reach out to me, but they are old legacy code and part time 1099. I can barely make myself put in over 15 hours combined per week with them though. Just feels like I am poisoning myself by going with them and want to do more interviewing but then the voice telling me it is pointless comes back so I just end up sitting in my home office for 12+ hours a day staring out the window.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience! It's really shitty to have applied so many times in a year and gotten nowhere. I can't help you out but for to encourage you that interviewing is always a numbers game. I find it depressing and have to apply to tons of companies and I'm not your age. My only trick is to take breaks when I need them and keep trying.
I'll share my personal experience, in case it helps. I only apply to small startups (less than 50 employees, but I usually get hired in places with <10 people). These have much more straightforward and short hiring processes. I find those companies solely from HN Who is Hiring thread or AngelList. I never got anything from a job post on Linkedin (much less Indeed and etc). I am a frontend developer, but I do see a lot of Python positions.
If you filter for companies based in the US only, the pay is pretty good.
There is a lot of luck involved in getting hired (especially after going through an interview, since from there the process is very subjective). It sucks, but you just have to keep trying. One day you will be the lucky one. Good luck!
Is the TC at these small companies (particularly taking into account the risk of any stock options) comparable to the TC at Big Tech (notwithstanding the recent sell-off on Wall Street)?
Or do you give up some TC for the other benefits of working at these small startups?
I don't think it violates any rules here, so sure. The company is called ServicePower, we run a handful of apps in the field service, insurance, and warranty industries. My teams are NodeJS, AWS, Kafka, but there are other teams (some with open recs as well) that do C++ or Java if that's more your thing. All teams are remote-first and all teams are US or UK. I added my email to my profile if you (or anyone else) is interested in discussing more.
Hey—I saw some of your past comments on your interviewing experience. Have you contributed to any open source projects? It can be helpful as a reference point in interviewing.
If you want to drop me an email, the least I can do is offer some feedback on your resume / online profile(s).
It's been my life experience that none of what you hear is "in demand" actually is, what it instead translates to is "not willing to pay or hire or train enough".
My friends who work in nursing tell me it's not that there isn't a talent pool, it's that they are short staffed due to hiring limitations more than lack of interest, which then feels like being short staffed because everyone is putting in more time, which makes the environment suck, which does make people quit, especially exaserbated with covid and conspiracy theorists treating them poorly. But until the underlying issues are solved, it's not a real shortage as there are qualified people looking for work but not being hired.
Teacher shortage is similar, not willing to pay them enough(even when school funding is high, teacher pay stays low), and the amount of bullshit they have to put up with seems to go up every year, which is unrelated to amount of people with teaching credentials.
Programming has a similar problem, every company wants senior roles but very few are willing to train, so it's a bottleneck more than a shortage.
This comment proves the author’s thesis, which is “The culture is ageist so you probably won’t stand out using the same skills as the newer devs or companies. Find an obscure, unsexy, perhaps almost obsolete niche and specialize because the kids or mid-career engineers don’t even bother with those jobs.”
Now if only there was a way to monetize a COBOL or ABAP channel on Youtube, hmmm…
>he receives 4000+ applications on a job and nobody in Europe should consider this career
Why would you assume he's trolling? In some EU countries the market is insanely competitive due to great free schools churning out coders like crazy due to the tech hype, plus tons of skilled immigrants from developing nations trying to break into the market, so companies are very picky since they get bombarded with applications, so people with little experience or failing the culture fit or whatever arbitrary metrics are used, can easily fall through the cracks and not find a job despite being talented.
The high demand you hear is true, but only for experienced seniors and, since nobody wants to take in juniors and train them this creates a bottleneck of artificial scarcity despite the high supply of less experienced devs.
I have a hard time believing that comment. I know people who graduated recently with a software developer degree. Some in their late 20ties and the degree is not from a university. They got instant job offers. If you have a degree and can actually write code, you're in.
Your inbox can literally have that many applications in it, but by far most of them are junk. A lot of them seem like they're sent to intentionally not get seen, like they're part of some requirement to apply for jobs or something like that, eg people with no appropriate skill listed, or anything at all similar to what was advertised.
Then there's also complete dreamers. I hear football clubs often get guys who've played Champ Manager sending in an application on a whim.
Tangential to this piece: if you're worried about ageism, consider going into to defense and aerospace. Lots of older developers because of the clearance requirement
Shit, they probably have trouble hiring & retaining people under 40, thanks to the clearance requirement. Big overlap between the millennial-and-younger tech crowd and folks who are fairly big fans of federally-illegal drugs. At least cannabis, if nothing else.
Not in my experience. There's plenty of people under 40 in the defense industry. Every big defense contractor has internship programs to feed people in fresh out of university. And once you're in, it can be difficult to get out, since the pay is above average for the regions (and the benefits are glorious), but the workload is so light. It's not unusual to be on a project that's going nowhere for four months, so you get to come in and do busy work.
Hiring is tough right now, but it's tough for everyone. But that has lead to a huge increase in wages. Every one of my friends in the industry has seen promotions and 40% pay raises.
Not just guns but spy satellites. You can spend your whole career in defense and be directly responsible for exactly 0 weapons, just helping to find things in satellite images or make sense of signal data or help naval vessels communicate better
If you already have a clearance, sure. Otherwise, it's usually more ageist, at least ever since the OPM hack caused the SSBI process to span out so long. Since you go back the lesser of either 10 years or when a candidate turned 18, it pays to hire people younger than 28 since their investigations won't have to go back as far and can thus be completed faster.
For older workers it can actually be easier because people move a lot in their 20s. A worker in their 40s might only have to list 3 addresses where a kid 2 years out of college might have to list like 5--one for every dorm and their parents and their first apartment
Not sure if I agree with some of the specifics of this, but the overall sentiment is still valuable. There's a lot of work out there for non-youngsters looking to get into software development. Lots of hiring companies will value your experience even if it's not directly related to coding.
Wrote these just after I switch careers ~4 years ago:
The author is telling people to pick up Cobol/Basic/Pascal/MUMPS (and not Go or another modern language) as their first language in 2022? To make themselves more employable? How did this make it to the front page? I get that some people will like the old-man grumpiness in the post but put that aside and focus on the actual advice they're giving - it's just outright harmful career advice.
And also, think about it from first principles - why would people starting their programming careers 15+ years later than most people need to pick different tools? It makes no sense at all.
>why would people starting their programming careers 15+ years later than most people need to pick different tools? It makes no sense at all.
*One low barries to entry* Companies like Vanguard are desperate for Cobol engineers. They'll train just about anyone. I know quite a few financial analysts of all ages that made the leap to maintain their legacy systems and are doing quite well for themselves. There is little competition for this sort of job
*It might work out well for everyone* Not everyone is looking to do the latest, most marketable work. Imagine someone that is 57 and plans to retire in 5-10 years. This works out great for both them and the employer. The employer gets coverage on their legacy systems, springs free folks earlier in their career to build that sexy, next gen replacement, the employee gets a nice, cushy ride into the sunset. If its planned well the replacement system arrives right around retirement time. Migrate and move to Florida
*Some folks are not looking to ride the dragon* Some folks love the idea of a system that is completely understood and battle tested. Some of these legacy systems benefit from 30-40 years of hardening. Adding enhancements and such have clear, uniform processes honed over decades with very little in the way of surprises. For many folks the idea of come in at 9 and leave at 5 with little volatility is very appealing.
> There is little competition for this sort of job
On both sides of the market. There's like 75 times as many javascript job listing as there are cobol ones on popular job boards.
You can get all of those things without leaning on a tech stack with such a small job pool. Most development jobs, especially at large companies, are maintenance-oriented development.
Java is the ecosystem to learn if the three points you listed are important to someone. There are gobs of Java jobs out there, many are battle-tested systems built long ago running in established companies. Another benefit is that there's an actual job market for Java developers, which should be a huge consideration for everyone, because having a stable job isn't the same as having a stable job feel good going to every day.
> And also, think about it from first principles - why would people starting their programming careers 15+ years later than most people need to pick different tools?
Because the people hiring people that are relatively inexperienced but not practicing undercover age discrimination tend to be very much not representative of the industry, or opportunities for new programmers, at large; people starting their career late need to specifically target that market segment, not the more general one.
Note: I am not convinced of the specific advice, particularly in language focus, that the author here gives, but it is still less wrong than your suggestion that there is no difference between the optimum approaches for (by age) late- and early-entrants to programming.
> Because the people hiring people that are relatively inexperienced but not practicing undercover age discrimination tend to be very much not representative of the industry, or opportunities for new programmers, at large; people starting their career late need to specifically target that market segment, not the more general one.
The other place that doesn't practice age discrimination as much in my experience is local companies. They have a hard time attracting anyone in the first place so it's the easiest to get started if you just show you're reliable and willing to learn/work.
> the people hiring people that are relatively inexperienced but not practicing undercover age discrimination tend to be very much not representative of the industry
That is our gain. I've interviewed some great talent for entry level positions who have 20 year experience in weird non-programming things. They lack the technical skills to be worth more than entry level pay, but their resume shows more passion than many of the fresh out of CS (or boot camp) they are competing against. They also have enough background that if their skills develop as expected they will move up the ladder quickly.
I agree with GP. The article's author is completely wrong IMO. If there is a difference in the approach of a twenty-something and a forty years old to start a software development career is not in the language choice. I think both should consider the same things regarding their choice. Namely: what they feel they like more and what has the most jobs.
The difference is more likely to be in the interview skills. How they can make an effort to relate more with the interviewer (since they won't "naturally" connect through popular videogame tastes, memes, slangs, or whatever).
My dad has a few decades experience with MUMPS and he has a hard time finding a job every time he's had to go looking. There are few jobs and they seem competitive.
I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to learn it now for a job.
If you get semi-technical there are loads of product owner/business analysts roles to fill in.
Let alone if you just want any job there is first line support / second line support.
There are plenty configuration roles which don't require knowledge of coding but ability to learn configuration settings, operating browser, operating software on different angle than just using it - but being able to congfigure it for others to use.
Are you asking if Java is unfashionable enough for it to be seen as a legacy niche- like COBOL or 4GL? Just because it’s out of fashion doesn’t mean isn’t crowded…
Ruby is more fashionable than Java web development. PHP is more fashionable than Ruby. Go is miles more fashionable than PHP. Python is more fashionable than GO. These change as Ruby was way more fashionable than PHP 10 years ago. Golang was way more fashionable over Python 2 years ago. PHP was more fashionable to Python 15 years ago.
Java is still fashionable because of android development.
>> new technology (fashion is about the new) often experiences a period of rapid change, and keeping up with change requires time and effort. Does somebody with a family, or outside interests, really want to spend time keeping up with constant change at work? I suspect no
BS.
I'm not one for terse responses but I cannot think of any better way to say it. This author evidently has never worked with anyone outside their graduating class. Without "outside interests" or "family" I predict they will burn out within five years.
If a new non-youngster developer wants to pursue the legacy app/niche language strategy described in the article then I tend to agree. ColdFusion is easy to learn but at the same time it's really just an abstraction layer for Java. If one finds they want to dip into the guts then that's certainly available. As you note, there's a respectable number of legacy apps, often in the US federal government sector. One still has to learn SQL, CSS, JS, etc.
I started to learn software development at 37 years old (shoutout to freeCodeCamp.org!). That was in 2017. I went the frontend route, so I naturally started with html, css, and javascript. Then, since React was already the most popular framework then, I started to learn it and build projects solely on React. I skipped Jquery, pre-ES5 javascript, and things like that. I focused on what was fashionable.
It turned out great for me! I am a very happy and successful (in financial terms compared to what I earned early or expected to earn these days) web developer.
Funny enough, my first job was using Ember. But six months in, the company decided to migrate to React, since it was getting harder and harder to hire people that wanted to work with Ember. Then a couple of React jobs. And now I started a job using Vue. So still learning fashionable things.
Btw, I never noticed ageism against me. I worked on a big Brazilian startup and then on three small American startups. Of course, plenty of the jobs that I applied for and didn't get could be because of ageism, I'll never know, but I consider myself to be successful in getting jobs, so at least I think it is not something that affected the general outcome of my career.