Aging, mediocre programmer seeks fellow technical-minded individuals
Very soon ageism will catch up with me and I'll be unemployed. ( I'm in my forties). I'm smart enough to do most business related software development but mediocre enough that I won't be hired by the likes of Google.
As they say, most technical work or any work that requires deep focused thinking is generally a race to the bottom. I see great potential if programmers/technical/above average minded people are willing to put aside their overly individualist and reclusive tendencies, and start realistically co-operating. I'll like to get in touch with fellow technical minded individuals who have realized this, and who want to hash out ideas for any mutual co-operation. I have nothing concrete in mind yet, but I can be reasonably sure that I'm not looking for software related ideas. I am 100% sure that if I do not take any steps now I'm going to be a unemployed bum in a few years. ( besides being unemployed you will also be see as useless - if you are male. Make no mistake, society is harsh on men who are not racking in money.)
A starting point could be some online forum where ideas/views can be exchanged. It must me emphasized that this post is not a solicitation for money. Money might be involved but only at a significantly later stage. Email: dennis_jeeves-1((at))yahoo.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
p.s - I have had a few emails to my previous similar posts. In addition to emailing me I suggest that you also respond to my post here. It lets readers know that there are people in similar situations and that their problems (of ageism/jobs) are not unique.
127 comments
[ 135 ms ] story [ 7436 ms ] threadThey may even create a new Junior developer position for you until you learn what you need to.
Tech talent is SO tight that alot of places will hire someone with passion and train them up.
If you get an interview sell them with your passion and excitement to learn. Maybe give yourself a week before the interview and research their tech stack and do a little project.
If they give you a tech assignment that you can do from home...just crush it. Dockerize it, make a fully functioning app out of it.etc etc. Make it wayyyy past their expectations.
Even if you don't get the position you have a project to add to your GitHub.
That's my best advice. Apply even if you're underqualified. And show extreme passion for the company and tech stack.
Also apply to tons and tons of jobs. Your new job if you're unemployed..is applying to jobs. Apply 8 hours a day using every resource you can. Be willing to move anywhere. It may take a month or two but you'll get a position. The US economy is trillions of dollars. The number of tech companies and business that use tech is in the hundreds of thousands. You're chances are way better than you realize.
Semi-recently I've come to this point of view. "Why say 'no' for them against yourself?" type of thinking.
Now I'm not entirely averse to software projects either and there could be a sweet spot - for example maintenance of legacy systems. But the point I was trying to make is that one must be willing to look outside of the software world.
Looking at their comments I really only see a lack of punctuation. Here's how I read the comment you're responding to:
> "Start a males-over-40 political party. Leverage computer knowledge to bring majority non-voters to vote—[as a] non-profit start up. Stop describing self a mediocre. That's real loser material."
Not so out of line for some HN comments. What tells indicate that it's a bot to you?
You have value past 40 and can continue to advance in your career. Take heart and don't listen to anyone that tells you to sell yourself short.
That does not mean you should avoid getting paid what your worth, just recognize some times a lower salary now can be very much worth it if you bridge from low demand but high pay skill X to the next high paying skill set.
First, I think you’re being unreasonably pessimistic. I know programmers who just got started learning the craft in their forties, without any special aptitude for the work, and they’re doing fine. If I wasn’t hand-crafting custom stacks for my work now, and had less ability to do so, there would still be an enormous demand for just stitching together functional services for the rest of my career. Probably a lot of Microsoft tech would be involved, and this work is stigmatized as “boring” a bit too often, but ASP.NET and related tools are pretty solid these days and you can add enormous value to organizations in many industries just by integrating this kind of infrastructure with their existing processes.
Second, I like the idea of branching out and finding new projects, but why abandon the computer side of it? This century will continue to see amazing new ways of doing business that were never possible before. Commodification of computing continues and shows no sign of stopping in my lifetime. Why not learn a new domain and then bring what you already know about technology together with that knowledge? That is as close to a guaranteed recipe for success as anything I’ve ever heard of.
It's unfortunate to think probably an entire generation in their 30's were finding work easily without a ton of experience, so the market never reinforced the fact that they didn't know enough about what they were doing and were going to start having trouble finding work because of it in their 40's.
My mom (also 57) on the other hand has a pretty negative world view (it sounds a lot like your MRA-like perspective, except the gender roles are reversed). Everything bad that happens to her is because of her race (black) or gender, at least according to her. She's now frequently unemployed, and unable to keep a roof over her head without support from her children. She also hasn't invested in improving her tech skills.
My point here is that I think you need to have a mental model where you're in control of your life, not of one where you're a passive vessel being buffeted by a harsh, discriminatory capitalistic system.
One further point, that I hope you don't take offensively is that you talk to someone about these feelings. A few months back I was chatting with my CEO's executive coach, and it went off in my head that I really should start talking to a therapist (I'd long resisted this thinking I wasn't mentally ill enough for it to work). Talking to a third party has been very useful for getting a better perspective on your own life, a perspective that your significant other, friends or family can't provide.
Good luck!
It might seem that if you don't take a crash course in machine learning and blockchain, that you'll be unemployable in a few years-- but in the past couple years I've personally seen dozens of business problems that could be solved by a decent programmer, and companies willing to pay for it, if only they had a way to connect. The problems just aren't where most people think the jobs are. Small manufacturing plants with funky regulatory requirements, construction companies, sausage factories. Not sexy, not glamorous. Just work that needs to be done.
I don't doubt that ageism is a thing, but depending on exactly how "aged" your particular skill set is, you might be more in-demand than you think. The last few jobs I've been involved with involving legacy hardware and software paid very well to the folks who still knew their way around 20+ year old systems.
If you're looking for completely non-computerized ideas, I can stay that I help run a small farming business in my spare time and would strongly suggest sticking to computers.
Updated email and web link in profile.
I would agree with this. Almost any core non-software business will have some software related work, if the volumes are high enough.
I think you have hit upon one of the major problems in the industry. They don't seem to find the 'right' fit. But why are they being so damn picky ? Can any decent programmer not learn the new stuff?
Anecdote time: I'm see recruiters ask for Java 8 experience and presumably I'm not considered because I do not have experience in Java 8. Is Java 8 impossible to learn for someone who has spent a fair amount of time developing in the previous versions of Java? Now if Java 8 was the only missing skill I would have considered learning it ( In fact I sort of skimmed through it and have more than a fair idea of what it is) but the whole game it does not end up with one new buzzword, there are atleast 10 others. noone can possibly learn up all topics that the requirements allude to.
If so, the recruiters are giving you a biased idea of the market.
Add the stuff they want to see to your existing resume. It's not complicated. It doesn't mean removing that C/C++ project you worked on for 5 years. It just means saying it was a C/C++/Java project. The hiring process is easy to hack once you start doing this. But you have to prep for the Java stuff.
This is what the Indian Bodyshopers have been doing for 15 years now. Please remember non of them started out as Java devs. They started out as "Y2K experts". And when that requirement evaporated they invented the concept of fudged resumes tailored to the requirements.
That's who you are competing with, if it is a run off the mill software job.
There are lots of all of the above where I live (rural northeast). The problem is that nobody I've spoken to is willing to pay for the solutions to those problems, not when they can hire somebody at minimum wage to sort of solve the problem in a halfass manner. It gets them most of the way there and it's more cost effective.
In that case I have a feeling it is more degree-ism than ageism, but hard to say for sure. Demand is apparently not enough.
The head hunter with the exec level salary job never contacted me.
Some of my contemporaries managed to stay employed continuously but most have periods of unemployment , job stagnation or retrenchment.I have no way to know if my personal sample of job (or not) match the industry but if it does then ageism may be a factor.
I guess if you've made up your mind that this is inevitable then it probably is. As a counterpoint I'm turning 57 this Thursday and I'm happily employed as an SRE for a small company. I'm well past "my forties" and have not found ageism to be a significant barrier. The OP did not request advice on how to remain technically relevant, so I won't offer any here, but if you're at the point where you're no longer interested in growing as an engineer then yeah, time to find something else to do.
Yes and no. Larger companies don't like hiring older employees because they can get more bang for their buck by hiring young(er) people who are willing to stick with the company for life. Being an older programmer who has been at the same company for 30+ years isn't proof that the company doesn't engage in ageism. It also means they're unaware of the current state of the hiring market and how brutal it's become over the past 10 years.
That being said, I have no idea how that problem should be addressed.
As someone who’s worked for older companies and younger ones, I feel like it’s all a matter of where direct technical management is placing emphasis, not some kind of deep seeded collusion between hiring managers.
Companies that want to ‘move fast’ tend to hire younger because they connotate old ~= slow. Companies that want solid, stable, well engineered solutions seem to feel like young ~= junior.
My opinion is: they're both kind of right in the aggregate. By and large the older people I’ve worked with and employed were a fair bit slower to get to initial done. But they got there in a well engineered way that had less post launch defects, was easier to maintain, and in general showed the decades of corner cases they have etched into their soul from all their battles.
By and large the younger/less experienced the more eager they were to pick up and learn the new and shiny tech. Which is awesome when we have to take on a new piece of tech for whatever reason. I typically find them voracious when pointed at a problem that interests them, and they usually hammer out something a noticeable amount faster than the older crowd. However, in general, the post launch defects are atrocious when compared to the more experienced crowd, I often see spaghetti architecture, and there’s much less pragmatism when it comes to decision making.
Surprise! Experienced people lean on their experience and wisdom and young people utilize their appetite for knowledge and their (comparatively) vast amount of stamina. It’s almost like there’s a few millennia of stories around this topic...
A room full of 10 year olds may learn fine on their own. Stick a 30 year old teacher in the room with them and watch their minds expand. A room full of 30 year olds can be kind of boring. Stick some young’ins in there with them and watch them play.
Good teams should have both. Experienced pros have a lot to teach and people that think they can’t learn anything from them are, frankly, stupid. I also strongly believe that youthful exuberance is infectious and makes it more fun for everyone to come in to work.
The simple fact that you oppose "30 years olds" to "young" is telling enough...
30 years old are supposed to be in the first quarter of their career, and yet you already place them in the 'old' side. We can only imagine what the representation of 40 years old, let alone 50 or 60 years old, is in this industry. Something than range from decrepit to senile, I suppose.
If we extrapolated that classroom analogy to the workplace I’d think it would be more akin to a mid to late 20s with mid-40s to early 50s. I think that 30ish year olds kind of fall in between depending on experience and aptitude.
My personal experience as a 35 year old is that my life has changed A LOT from 30-35 (no kids, Seattle to 3 kids, Portland suburbs) but my skill level has grown in harder to define ways.
At 26 I was an engineering lead and coaching a 23, 35, and 41 year old. At 30 I was managing a fairly large team that ranged from 20 to 67. All of my employees today are older than me.
I think it’s dumb to assume someone’s skill just based on their age, but I truly believe someone who’s had more years of experience and is good at their craft is going to bring years of experience that you just plain ol’ cannot get without time and repetition.
I think ageism is a real thing in our industry, I’ve seen my dad go through something that sure seemed like it, but I also think there are a ton of companies out there that are usually not worried so much about age, but are looking for cheaper salaries or people willing to kill themselves for ‘the opportunity’.
Not sure if OP is interested in your advice, but I am sure there are others who would be. Please do share any advice that you can! Specifically for those who don't want to (or can't) get into "management"
Like you said, we know our craft good enough to know that we're not smart enough to be of interest for Google:) Maybe we're suffering a bit from the Dunning–Kruger effect, but still, the future is grim and it will take everyone by surprise. The next tech breakthrough won't take decades, but months and then you'll be obsolete. I don't think there's a point in investing to learn Quantum computing or AI, if u're not smart enough to understand.
That being said, under qualification never stopped anyone from deploying WP sites or otherwise really, really insecure PHP sites.. so...
99% of the people employed doing AI work in the technology field broadly, will not be creating or directly working with difficult-to-understand AI tech. They'll be using tools that work with that tech. Many layers that ride on top, each with their own tools, will be created as AI gets more and more complex. It will ultimately employ a vast number of average engineers.
Just what I said: it will become the next blue collar job, but you're right, there always be enough tools for average engineers. I'm still not convinced if a new company would hire a 50 year old instead of a 25 year old 'average engineer'... though, I would... more experience beats more technical knowledge (for the latest buzz worthy framework/language) in my book, but maybe that's just me?
I mean the general tone of advice seems to be: learn new things, have a great attitude, be positive, keep trying etc. What's new may I ask?
There is no shortage of gray-haired people at my job. My sysadmin just retired. This was a sad day for me, which brings me to my other point: it's dumb to prefer youth over experience among programmers.
Programming is a design job, not grunt work, as Martin Fowler said (https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html#Se...). Designers get better with age. Would you rather have Frank Lloyd Wright in his 20s or 60s?
Fair enough. But where?
>There is no shortage of gray-haired people at my job. My sysadmin just retired. This was a sad day for me, which brings me to my other point: it's dumb to prefer youth over experience among programmers.
List your company here. It might help somebody.
I weathered the dot-com bust; it's the current hiring regimen of proving competence in this month's buzzword that will drive me out of technology entirely.
And nothing is more maddening than hearing about a "developer shortage" or complaints about "how hard it is to hire."
Then there is this "positivity" culture in tech that grinds anyone of any age. It's just that the older you get, the more you begin to recognize it for what it actually is: a method through which to enforce an outwardly happy compliance with an environment that is needlessly grueling and sometimes even abusive. It is designed to bully you into submission with conditions that are unhealthy. "If you can't remain positive, well, then you are out!" is the loud-and-clear on that one.
You mention Google; why would you want to work there? There are millions of companies around the world that need programmers acutely and the larger ones of those need architects/experienced software engineers. That many of them cannot fill positions so settle for less because they have to.
I'm not sure, besides some FUD online, where you get your depressing future life outlook from? I am asking because I did read some articles about this online, but seems that you hear it everywhere...
List them please.