If you weren't stagnant when you were young, you're not going to be stagnant when you're old.
Younger ones have the benefit that their skills are still likely to be relevant at a larger subset of the employer pool.
Also, in my experience, stagnation can run in the other direction, temporally. I encounter many young people who won't even learn about, much less consider, using a tool like 'make', simply based on the assumption that newer seemingly similar tools must be better. Sometimes the old ways really are superior for the task at hand.
Most of the successful tech people I know that are 50+ never overstayed their welcome at companies where they stopped learning, or they were always being recruited by other firms and moved around. Recruiters generally aren't knocking on doors of someone who has been at the same company for 20 years, and that's for a variety of reasons.
Not the way you're describing it. However, there's a pretty common correlation between age and relevance of skillset, which is a direct consequence of stagnation over many years.
The point is that someone saying "old == stagnant" may actually be thinking of it the way I'm describing, which has more validity.
Younger ones can have all the latest Javascript library experience they want but they still don’t have enough obvious experience for engineering mastery that’s vital to being a highly-productive independent contributor or tech lead.
Read it again. It's referring to older stagnant people, not all older people. The longer someone has been stagnant, the more out of date their skills become.
Because that is the case generally speaking. People become more resistant to change as they get older. They become more conservative, their openness trait decreases.
That last sentence sounded a bit cynical - So anyway, the main trick with being older in tech is not being open but remaining enthusiastic (most days)
Suppose my boss asks me to find a good Thai restaurant for lunch. If I'm new to the area, I'll be very "open" and spend a lot of time looking into the possibilities, etc. If I have a lot of experience eating at Thai places in town, I'll be less open. I already know the best one out of a substantial set, and it's less likely that I'll find a better one without a lot of work. Call it stagnation, or call it being careful with the company's money.
Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these projects seem to have less commitment to their technical decisions long-term.
If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind.
I have no fears of being completely unemployable in my 50's or 60's. But in my mid-40's now, I'm already losing interest in web development as a particular niche. A lot of students and junior developers might not be completely aware that there's even a difference, a subset/superset thing there.
Web development is so accessible, anyone can self-teach. It's not so common to learn EAI, ETL, large-scale batch processing or data streaming, etc by way of personal GitHub side projects. It's basically a long, slow process of getting hired for roles that you're not 100% ready for, at companies with those sorts of needs, and growing into it over time.
> If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind.
I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they do change. I did a bit of Java/Hibernate work 8+ years ago. I look at modern Java code bases now and it's so annotation heavy I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
The age bias is real.
While humans are growing up, we're accustomed to view our "elders" as our superiors in all respects. Childhood teachers encourage this view. However, at the point when you enter the workforce, in my opinion you should set these ideas aside and treat everyone as a peer; and keep your mind open to the idea that both people may have something to learn from the other.
No missed opportunity, I pivoted the deal after turning down the first.
If there's a major shift in those languages (vs. JavaScript) it seems more worth it to retrain once it's solidified and you see companies actually looking for those skills.
Fast moving ecosystems means more things become deprecated more quickly and you also risk more "train thing that will be useless next year".
Yes, COBOL is still being used at many of these companies, but other departments are using up-to-date .NET or Java and don't ever look at COBOL.
After 6mth of hunting in vain, he wrote a CV focussed on his oldest skill -- Fortran -- and found a role in weeks. When he told me this, he'd been renewed 5 times and had been in a 6mth role for nearly 3 years. He suspected he'd be doing it for the rest of his working life.
I got a bunch of interviews around 2010-2011 for DEC OpenVMS sysadmin work. I do have VMS skills, but not high-level ones -- but companies were having real problems finding people to maintain their Alpha and Itanium servers. The demand was there.
I think the hole that older developers fall into is that their particular skills are out of date, and they have not expanded their skill set. I've talked to C++ developers who can't speak to anything beyond writing C++03 code for the last decade. You're basically looking for a niche position with that resume.
Among older tech workers I know, I see a growing divide in their career tracks. A few become high priced consultants and charge between $200 to $300 an hour. The rest are in jobs where they are just hoping they don’t get fired. See recent stories about IBM.
I can't speak in general, but I have observed in my circles that this is at least somewhat true, and for altogether natural reasons.
Most people, once they hit their late 30s or 40s, family (if they have one) takes priority and they don't have as much time to dedicate to going to Meetup groups, conferences or late nights spent gaining proficiency in new technologies. In general having kids vastly reduces one's free time.
Knowing a technology deeply requires many hours of intentional practice, commitment and energy, which many if not most people in that age range with families don't have a lot of at their disposal. Their "tech growth rate" slows down considerably relative to when they were in their 20s.
For example, I've noticed many SQL DBAs of a certain age have a hard time learning distributed databases because they often expect something familiar (databases are databases, right?) yet find themselves having to bone up on so many new concepts (that CS degree was so long ago) that many give up. Only the truly dedicated, truly passionate and truly nerdy persist, but they are in the minority. A common refrain heard is that "there's just too much new stuff coming out all the time, you can't learn everything", which is true, but it's often also an oft-employed excuse for not dedicating oneself to being current.
So when most average tech folks hit 50, they have pretty much lost about 1-1.5 decades of high-rate tech learning.
I try to keep an open mind when interviewing these folks, and we even have some great employees with that background, but so very few of them surprise me positively.
I sincerely hope they get rescued from their dead end jobs some how. It's such a shame. So much talent just getting wasted (IMHO).
When I advise clients on career topics like this, I usually weigh whether the day job provides the client with a marketable skill set. If not, that person needs to consider doing things outside of work to maintain marketability. If the day job provides challenges and the proper set of tech, no real need to invest much additional time to learning.
Absolutely, and if they are not, one can either ask for them or switch jobs. The latter unfortunately is less of an option in smaller metro areas where the job market is limited. I've friends in smaller cities are who are stuck because there are only a few games in town.
That said, remote work is an option these days.
But there is still the inertia and difficult of switching jobs (an HN post a couple of days ago speaks to the difficulty in moving to a new tech job).
I am still at the one of the lowest levels on the totem pole, so maybe I am missing something obvious here.
In journalism, the career path is jr writer, writer, sr writer, jr editor, sr editor -- and then you go do management.
I was the IT Manager of a London stockbroker in the City by 26 years old. I didn't like it and ultimately quit.
But the expected career path for many companies is to go from being a "mere" techie to being a manager. If you don't want to do that, then age becomes a big problem.
I changed track to journalism, not knowing that the Web was going to kill the computer magazine industry within a decade. But short term, it was a good move, and I loved it.
More and more people going into software engineering than in previous generations.
most importantly the kind of work that was available for me 20 years ago was just inherently more interesting than the kind of work I can find today.
if you don't get 'retirement money' early on, I would highly recommend spinning up another vocation to spend your later years with. at the very least you're in a privileged position where, ageism and market conditions aside, you can always backfill with a little drudge work.
Those that have a hard time getting back in are often a victim of discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation. A 50 year old who has worked on five interesting diverse projects in the last 10 years will find work. A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late.