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A comment on Over half of older US workers are pushed out of longtime jobs before they retire. Parent comment

Re:Over half of older US workers are pushed out of longtime ... by thatoneuser on Saturday December 29, 2018 @05:19PM (#18786053)
I guess I should have been better at that statement. I’m not talking mentally disabled in the low iq sense, but more on a relativistic sense. I would wildly guess that consultants make up 25% or less of the workforce (really that’s an intuitive guess so it’s probably a lot more or less). Which would imply only around the top % to match that number (whatever it is) are even capable of being a consultant. And then you have to have the social/network skills, the ability to plan around uncertainty, the ability to shift industries if yours becomes automated or your knowledge falls too far from modern practices, etc.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve worked as a consultant and really enjoyed it. But I’m also young and I can take risks like that. I honestly fear for anyone who doesn’t have a severely privileged background attempting to make this a viable career alternative to traditional work. There are so so many gotchas.

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Re:Over half of older US workers are pushed out of longtime ... by scarface74 on Saturday December 29, 2018 @06:02PM (#18786226)
Ideally, I would prefer to work for a consulting company as an overpriced “implementation consultant”, “digital transformation consultant”, etc.

I’ve been recruited (ie lunch with hiring managers who wanted to talk to me) for such a role because of my experience based on my resume but I knew that I needed to take some time to get more real world experience in a few areas - cloud and front end and the $cool_kids JavaScript stack.

That being said, I am in my mid 40s and consider myself competitive in the local market as a back end developer/architect with the Microsoft stack and fairly competitive with AWS.

As far as being “privileged”, I found the industry to be mostly merit based over my 20+ year career. I’m a minority, below average height, went to a no name state college and I have a slight disability - not the model of someone with any “privilege”. I’ve never been rejected for a job that I thought I was qualified for - I also only use recruiters. I don’t waste my time blindly submitting resumes.

That may change in three or four years when I am looking for my next job. There are relatively few local companies that do the type of consulting that I’m focusing on compared to standard “full stack” developer/architect roles.

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