One of the sharpest developers I have ever worked with -- was 63. He did only mobile development and only would agree to work 30 hours a week. When I pressed him on it, he explained that he liked to constantly be working on both Android and iOS projects, 30 hours a week each, and that kept his backlog of waiting clients happy.
EDIT: He completed the iOS application under budget with wonderful tests.
+1 investing constantly in education and learning new skills is the way to go!
I am 62 and I have been consulting for 15 years so age has not such an issue. Honestly, I can understand why a company might not want to hire an older software engineer but in my experience companies don't mind old consultants.
When asked for advice by people wanting to have a lifestyle (work on your own terms) consulting business, I suggest they, in addition to working, also invest time in writing a lot (blogging, books) and contributing to open source projects.
You should write a counter-post expanding on what you've said, because this, especially the ending "choose yourself a new profession", is super out-of-whack. All the power to people like you, Ma'am!
This post is touching on two issues that are somewhat related but different:
1. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard;
2. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in favour of twentysomethings.
Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years.
(1) is a pretty strong driver for everyone having a long term plan to control your own fate, which means working for yourself. That is, if you're not in industry with inbuilt protections (eg teaching).
(2) is harder to pin down.
On the one hand, there is a certain (un)survivor bias in that many who started as engineers in their 20s are managers or the like by their 40s. So are those who remain in engineering a good sample?
Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have. Family, for example. This can reduce the amount of time you spend on self-improvement. This industry almost requires constant learning, reinvention and skill acquisition. Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?
It's often said that a good technical foundation and education means you can pickup any language. This is true but picking up new skills is both a habit and a skill, one that atrophies if left untapped (IMHO). It's also a question of degree. Perl to Python? Not a big gap. Ada to Ruby? Well....
That all being said, there is age discrimination in this industry. I've personally witnessed someone say "I prefer new grads so I can mold them". That's fine and all but if you say that and don't hire a 50 year old programmer that's a good basis for an age discrimination suit because, well, it is age discrimination.
So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.
> Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?
Um, I'm 54 and the languages of my 20's were C, C++, etc.
I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters.
> So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.
Or, you can be a driver of this change yourself by developing a modern, advanced programming language.
If you don't hire someone because they know Ada instead of Ruby, the odds that you're profoundly shortsighted are extremely high.
I once worked at a startup whose cofounders told me that I was the oldest person in the office (having just turned 26) because "people over 30 don't get technology", meanwhile, they couldn't understand HTML, much less programming, and therefore had to hire me.
The very best programmer I know works primarily in Ada at his day job, whereas I know all the trendy web fads. If I had to choose him or me as an employee to write code, regardless of language, I'd choose him, objectively. If he starts working on whatever I'm working on, he'd almost certainly be better at it than me in a week. Whenever I have a difficult programming problem, I can struggle with it for hours (or days), and he can make it clear in minutes. He can look at my code in a language he's never seen before, for example, and solve my problem. It seems like a lot of companies are in the habit of hiring resumes instead of people.
The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things.
Some of the seemingly widespread opinions in this industry (or at least among startup scene types) make me wonder how most of you manage not to drown when it rains. Some of the stuff I hear just makes no sense. It's not based in logic.
Fortunately for guys like my friend, defense contractors and other huge corporations will be hiring devastatingly skilled people who have "boring, obsolete" skillsets for the foreseeable future. They're probably too smart to work at our on-average-destined-to-fail startups anyway.
Contrary to popular belief, computer skills really don't decay that much. "New" things aren't really that new, they're almost always related to or based on something we've seen before, and if you're really any good at what you do, it won't take you long to get a grasp on it.
Analogy: If you wouldn't hire Bruce Lee because he doesn't know the latest direct-to-DVD self-defense technique by Generic UFC Guy (TM)... you're making a huge mistake.
tl;dr: make snap judgements and you're going to wind up sub-optimal employees.
"Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have."
Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomenon.
"Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?"
No. Is it an example of racism if you didn't want to hire a drug trafficking nigerian scammer and pedophile as a baby sitter for your 5 year old daughter?
The idea that these are even relevant examples is ageism or racism. I don't know a single 45 year old software engineer who knows Ada, Cobol and Forth. They didn't serve in Vietnam either.
Everyone knows they have to be up-to-date with current technologies and it becomes easier with age because many changes are very superficial to the point of being trivial.
>>"Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years."
Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.
If anything I would have thought there would be more 40-60 year olds in the work force than 20-40 year olds (or at least a close number). So either some of them have to move into management of non technical staff or you end up with a very top heavy management structure.
Tech companies seem to prefer a flatter management structure to avoid too much bureaucracy.
In an industry like O&G or energy experience is highly valued. When you have you have potentially billions of dollars on the line and many peoples lives with an oil platform you want someone who has done it before.
In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer.
"I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article:"
So in other words somebody made a comment.
A comment!
Not a WSJ story even, or a story in a b newspaper or, but a blog comment.
Add: I mean if someone had posed an "Ask HN" question and everybody gives their thoughts (anecdotal or otherwise) that's fine. But this???
Add: With the resulting suggestion, once again based on a blog comment taken as being true, authentic, researched and validated: "Do your future self a favor, find another occupation."
It is an example of ageism to assume that "the older you get in general, the more non-work priorities you have." Basically that is what's implied by the "ism" part - assigning the characteristics that may be present in some members of a group to all members of that group.
I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground.
That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people.
In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely.
I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.
This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk):
1) Get your MBA and go into management;
2) Start or join a consultancy;
3) Start a company.
My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).
"I know two or more engineers around the age of 60 that graduated from MIT or Stanford 35 years ago. Of those two or more, at least one has lost his job, and at least one is afraid of losing his job."
Here's what the article doesn't say: what field these engineers are in, whether or not they're good at their job, what company they work(ed) for, what they work on, how up-to-date their knowledge is, etc.
Maybe there is age discrimination in the engineering field, but you certainly can't infer that from this anecdote.
"""When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly."""
Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?
The first book I co-authored on Android programming is already so obsolete it is in O'Reilly's repository of free downloads - the back list of the back list.
SICP, which, when it was published, summed up a lot of what I had learned as an undergrad. Nobody reads it to write a mobile app. Since I read it, I had jobs or book contracts that depended on knowledge of LISP machines, bit slice, the original Macintosh OS, Windows telephony API, edge routers, core routers trying to be edge routers, J2ME, Linux on ARM, and Android. Android will be around another 10 years, maybe a bit more or less, and it too will be a museum piece.
My shortest trajectory from zero to Noted Authority and back to zero was when I had a book contract to write about Visual J++. Thank you, Sun's lawyers, for that short trip.
All that said, if you don't know anything about project management tools, estimating market size, or how to write, or critique, a cash flow and P&L projection, your knowledge is going to be hard to package in a form that has high value.
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
And engineer in his 60 will be worth his weight in gold just for knowing all the ways a project can fail and all the unknown unknowns that can bite you in the ass.
And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under the hood.
That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will hire him in a second given the chance.
Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class reunion to be a great networking opportunity. And, of course, my time has a low opportunity cost. Conversely, am I willing to fly across the country for the weekend if I'm working a lot and need to be in the office on Monday morning? Also, those whose lives at age 60 aren't all that fulfilling professionally or otherwise might be more likely to attend a reunion where the could be reminded of better times. [I say this as someone excited to attend my 20 year high school reunion this summer.] A survey of Stanford engineering graduates done by random selection would be much more interesting.
I've witnessed the exact opposite. My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60.
OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer, because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.
My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60.
Yeah, I realized that I disliked management (the concept) when I realized that managing is, in most cases, just as bad as being managed.
What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.
I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are usually people or process related. If a project fails or succeeds depends much more on who does the work and how it gets planned and executed than what particular language or techniques you use.
So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.
I think the better course is to follow the Mr Money Mustache idea. Plan, save and invest on purpose, so that you can retire if you want to, or are forced to. Then do whatever you want. You don't have to retire, you can do exactly what you're doing now if you like. If no one wants what you do ... do something else, or "retire" (whatever that means to you).
Always do something newer at home than at work. This is really easy and cheap in CS/IT vs say chemistry or physics or medicine.
There's no need to have hardware at home faster than work. Software that's newer or more complicated than at work, sure.
Keep up with changes in the industry, just like any engineering career. I never fail to be amazed at meeting people who have no idea whats going on in tech outside their work department. They're doomed in the long run.
Learn 'the next thing' and get jobs (or volunteer!) doing 'the next thing', mod customer needs, your career goals and your tolerance for risk and change. I've moved from Fortran to PL/1 to C to C++ to VB5/VB6 to ASP to PHP to ASP.NET to R. It isn't pretty, but I've stayed employed for 30 years now, mostly in places that suited my needs/goals. Smarter people with better goals should have better career histories than I.
This article is incredibly terse and uninformative. Why are older engineers having such a hard time? Are they keeping up with new technologies to remain competitive? What kind of engineering are we even talking about?
The problem of ageism is pretty well documented in engineering, especially software engineering.
I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage.
To be fair, this post is just rehashing the point that the blogger (Lion of the Blogosphere, formerly known as HalfSigma) has been making for 5+ years now.
He's a Manhattan-based lawyer who really doesn't like software developers, and is constantly warning his readers not to let their kids major in computer science. He cites outsourcing, stagnating wages, lack of long-term career development, and perceived low status as reasons why one should stay away from most things in tech, especially anything that could be conflated with "programming" or "IT" by people outside the tech world.
Then again, he doesn't offer any real alternative advice. It's usually some variation of "be rich and work at a non-profit".
I witnessed three different engineers in two different companies turned down late in the interview process by upper management due to their age.
Prior to that I ran the technical part of interview and green-lighted the candidates. The problem is real and when it happens, whatever skill set you have is irrelevant.
Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer.
The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older.
There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything.
I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"
One of the best engineers I have worked with is on his 60's. When I worked with him, the rest of the engineering team had an average age of 23 or so (me being 32), but this guy could give everyone a run for their money.
This is not about age, but about staying current and sharp. Keep learning, and you won't have this issue.
Sure, a guy fresh out of school has a ton of energy and works crazy hours, but as an Engineering Manager and Product Manager I knew that if I needed something to be really done on time I could always trust the older (and quite frankly way smarter) guy.
This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but reading comments to some other posts on this blog almost made my jaw drop.
"The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast, especially NYC. "
TL;DR if you spend 35 years as an engineer, you'll still need to work for a living, but if you spend 35 years as an entrepreneur or VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top.
Yeah, that's not true at all. Lots of people find success as an entrepreneur but they're the exceptions, not the rule. I'm not saying that it's something that people shouldn't attempt, and it certainly has a higher success rate than attempting to be, say, a rock star or a professional athlete, but it is by nature a high risk endeavor.
if you spend 35 years as a[...] VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top.
Fixed that.
However, if you have a Stanford degree, you have an inside track on being a funded entrepreneur, so it may be a safer path.
Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit.
At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem.
New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as long as you've got something to contribute.
Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone immediately awesome.
Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.
I'm 40, but I'm not about to tell a 55-year-old what it's like to try and find employment as a 55-year-old. Just saying 'keep yourself current' is missing a lot of the picture.
One datapoint from Chicago: Got laid off at age 56 last year and had two offers within two weeks. But I interviewed at several other places without receiving an offer whereas in the past I almost always got an offer if I got an interview (Google excepted). Here is some speculation about why my batting average dropped. I do feel that age worked against me but I don't think it was because of the companies having institutional biases against hiring older people. Rather, I think it was just the mindsets of individual 20-something/30-something interviewers making individual decisions based on what felt comfortable, based on the vibe feeling ok. Nobody here is doing anything wrong.
[+] [-] MaggieL|12 years ago|reply
I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012.
I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.
[+] [-] MetaCosm|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: He completed the iOS application under budget with wonderful tests.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
I am 62 and I have been consulting for 15 years so age has not such an issue. Honestly, I can understand why a company might not want to hire an older software engineer but in my experience companies don't mind old consultants.
When asked for advice by people wanting to have a lifestyle (work on your own terms) consulting business, I suggest they, in addition to working, also invest time in writing a lot (blogging, books) and contributing to open source projects.
[+] [-] morganwilde|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zura|12 years ago|reply
I learned C++ in 1999 and it still does the job in 2055.
[+] [-] onemorepassword|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|12 years ago|reply
1. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard;
2. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in favour of twentysomethings.
Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years.
(1) is a pretty strong driver for everyone having a long term plan to control your own fate, which means working for yourself. That is, if you're not in industry with inbuilt protections (eg teaching).
(2) is harder to pin down.
On the one hand, there is a certain (un)survivor bias in that many who started as engineers in their 20s are managers or the like by their 40s. So are those who remain in engineering a good sample?
Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have. Family, for example. This can reduce the amount of time you spend on self-improvement. This industry almost requires constant learning, reinvention and skill acquisition. Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?
It's often said that a good technical foundation and education means you can pickup any language. This is true but picking up new skills is both a habit and a skill, one that atrophies if left untapped (IMHO). It's also a question of degree. Perl to Python? Not a big gap. Ada to Ruby? Well....
That all being said, there is age discrimination in this industry. I've personally witnessed someone say "I prefer new grads so I can mold them". That's fine and all but if you say that and don't hire a 50 year old programmer that's a good basis for an age discrimination suit because, well, it is age discrimination.
So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.
This is known.
[+] [-] WalterBright|12 years ago|reply
Um, I'm 54 and the languages of my 20's were C, C++, etc.
I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters.
> So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.
Or, you can be a driver of this change yourself by developing a modern, advanced programming language.
[+] [-] PostOnce|12 years ago|reply
I once worked at a startup whose cofounders told me that I was the oldest person in the office (having just turned 26) because "people over 30 don't get technology", meanwhile, they couldn't understand HTML, much less programming, and therefore had to hire me.
The very best programmer I know works primarily in Ada at his day job, whereas I know all the trendy web fads. If I had to choose him or me as an employee to write code, regardless of language, I'd choose him, objectively. If he starts working on whatever I'm working on, he'd almost certainly be better at it than me in a week. Whenever I have a difficult programming problem, I can struggle with it for hours (or days), and he can make it clear in minutes. He can look at my code in a language he's never seen before, for example, and solve my problem. It seems like a lot of companies are in the habit of hiring resumes instead of people.
The older you are, the more time you've had not only to gain concrete skills, but to learn to abstract your existing skills and knowledge to apply to other things.
Some of the seemingly widespread opinions in this industry (or at least among startup scene types) make me wonder how most of you manage not to drown when it rains. Some of the stuff I hear just makes no sense. It's not based in logic.
Fortunately for guys like my friend, defense contractors and other huge corporations will be hiring devastatingly skilled people who have "boring, obsolete" skillsets for the foreseeable future. They're probably too smart to work at our on-average-destined-to-fail startups anyway.
Contrary to popular belief, computer skills really don't decay that much. "New" things aren't really that new, they're almost always related to or based on something we've seen before, and if you're really any good at what you do, it won't take you long to get a grasp on it.
Analogy: If you wouldn't hire Bruce Lee because he doesn't know the latest direct-to-DVD self-defense technique by Generic UFC Guy (TM)... you're making a huge mistake.
tl;dr: make snap judgements and you're going to wind up sub-optimal employees.
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|12 years ago|reply
Why would you think so? I left home at age 18. My parents were 37 and 40 years old at the time. At that time and for many years after that, I had tons of non-work priorities, certainly more than my parents. And I don't think that's an exception. Most people never really make work their priority. Don't mistake that for an age related phenomenon.
"Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?"
No. Is it an example of racism if you didn't want to hire a drug trafficking nigerian scammer and pedophile as a baby sitter for your 5 year old daughter?
The idea that these are even relevant examples is ageism or racism. I don't know a single 45 year old software engineer who knows Ada, Cobol and Forth. They didn't serve in Vietnam either.
Everyone knows they have to be up-to-date with current technologies and it becomes easier with age because many changes are very superficial to the point of being trivial.
[+] [-] qxf2|12 years ago|reply
Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
If anything I would have thought there would be more 40-60 year olds in the work force than 20-40 year olds (or at least a close number). So either some of them have to move into management of non technical staff or you end up with a very top heavy management structure.
Tech companies seem to prefer a flatter management structure to avoid too much bureaucracy.
[+] [-] samfisher83|12 years ago|reply
In tech you are trying to make something no one has done before so you want the young hungry engineer.
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
This entire thread is based on the following:
"I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article:"
So in other words somebody made a comment.
A comment!
Not a WSJ story even, or a story in a b newspaper or, but a blog comment.
Add: I mean if someone had posed an "Ask HN" question and everybody gives their thoughts (anecdotal or otherwise) that's fine. But this???
Add: With the resulting suggestion, once again based on a blog comment taken as being true, authentic, researched and validated: "Do your future self a favor, find another occupation."
[+] [-] ojbyrne|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidAdams|12 years ago|reply
That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people.
In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely.
I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
You had me until "nudist." Dare I ask?
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3) Start a company.
My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).
[+] [-] jrockway|12 years ago|reply
"I know two or more engineers around the age of 60 that graduated from MIT or Stanford 35 years ago. Of those two or more, at least one has lost his job, and at least one is afraid of losing his job."
Here's what the article doesn't say: what field these engineers are in, whether or not they're good at their job, what company they work(ed) for, what they work on, how up-to-date their knowledge is, etc.
Maybe there is age discrimination in the engineering field, but you certainly can't infer that from this anecdote.
[+] [-] MetaCosm|12 years ago|reply
Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
SICP, which, when it was published, summed up a lot of what I had learned as an undergrad. Nobody reads it to write a mobile app. Since I read it, I had jobs or book contracts that depended on knowledge of LISP machines, bit slice, the original Macintosh OS, Windows telephony API, edge routers, core routers trying to be edge routers, J2ME, Linux on ARM, and Android. Android will be around another 10 years, maybe a bit more or less, and it too will be a museum piece.
My shortest trajectory from zero to Noted Authority and back to zero was when I had a book contract to write about Visual J++. Thank you, Sun's lawyers, for that short trip.
All that said, if you don't know anything about project management tools, estimating market size, or how to write, or critique, a cash flow and P&L projection, your knowledge is going to be hard to package in a form that has high value.
[+] [-] frostmatthew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|12 years ago|reply
And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under the hood.
That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will hire him in a second given the chance.
[+] [-] ShabbyDoo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|12 years ago|reply
OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer, because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, I realized that I disliked management (the concept) when I realized that managing is, in most cases, just as bad as being managed.
[+] [-] kamaal|12 years ago|reply
I wouldn't want to take such a risk when I'm 60.
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstallings|12 years ago|reply
So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
There's no need to have hardware at home faster than work. Software that's newer or more complicated than at work, sure.
Keep up with changes in the industry, just like any engineering career. I never fail to be amazed at meeting people who have no idea whats going on in tech outside their work department. They're doomed in the long run.
[+] [-] pjmorris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjackson2012|12 years ago|reply
I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage.
It's too bad because I would rather just program.
[+] [-] clarkm|12 years ago|reply
He's a Manhattan-based lawyer who really doesn't like software developers, and is constantly warning his readers not to let their kids major in computer science. He cites outsourcing, stagnating wages, lack of long-term career development, and perceived low status as reasons why one should stay away from most things in tech, especially anything that could be conflated with "programming" or "IT" by people outside the tech world.
Then again, he doesn't offer any real alternative advice. It's usually some variation of "be rich and work at a non-profit".
[+] [-] varjag|12 years ago|reply
Prior to that I ran the technical part of interview and green-lighted the candidates. The problem is real and when it happens, whatever skill set you have is irrelevant.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer.
The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older.
There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything.
I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"
[+] [-] elhector|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riggins|12 years ago|reply
Yep. I don't know why these types of posts get so many comments. It seems really obvious.
[+] [-] UK-AL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10098|12 years ago|reply
"The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast, especially NYC. "
lolwut
[+] [-] codex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwfunk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonbrown|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
Fixed that.
However, if you have a Stanford degree, you have an inside track on being a funded entrepreneur, so it may be a safer path.
[+] [-] tibbon|12 years ago|reply
At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem.
New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as long as you've got something to contribute.
Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone immediately awesome.
Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.
[+] [-] vacri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctrager|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yekko|12 years ago|reply