Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On (2012)

For my own part, this is still what I love to do. I'm busy 10 or more hours a day and at least eight of them are spent with some technology I knew nothing about six months ago. I was layed off from another startup at the end of September and started this current gig three weeks later. We just finished five weeks ramping up on Google Container Engine, during which time I also learned to use GNU make for the first time, and learned about etcd and Google Compute Engine. What it boils down to is this: stay interested, and stay current, and you stay employed. If those things are not within your power you no longer belong in this craft.

Of the companies I went onsite to, half of them gave me offers. The others didn't, but not because of ageism but because my interview performance wasn't as strong as I hoped (asking questions in areas I wasn't prepared for, lack of expertise in their desired programming lang, screwed up the coding question, etc). All of the offers I received were an increase from my current job.

Overall I would say that ageism doesn't exist. Employers want people that can contribute quickly without a lot of handholding and without training. This applies whether or not you are a fresh grad or a veteran programmer. If you instill confidence that you are highly qualified to the interviewer, you will generally get the job.

And as someone who has been intimately involved in the hiring process as a hiring manager, I can say the same thing. I've interviewed people of a variety of ages and the only takeaway I care about is will they hit the ground running and contribute to the team quickly. That's why software developers are highly paid. When I first started working, IBM would give aptitude tests completely unrelated to programming, and if you did well, you would get a job and be trained.

Unfortunately those days don't exist anymore, for the most part. It's a problem caused strictly because of how highly paid engineers are. If salaries were 50-60k, then I'm pretty sure companies would be more apt to training and waiting for new people to get on board. But salaries are easily 3X that in the Valley, so at that price, you need to be contributing very quickly otherwise you're a waste of money.

I turn 68 next month. 7 years ago I was cold-call recruited (they called, not me) and offered by three companies all wanting embedded systems expertise. All at the same time. Never rains but it pours, eh?

Two were boring embedded Linux. One was fun gaming console OS. Audio SDK and DSP, specifically (although I was not pointed there for a good year after hiring). I'm still there. And the interesting bit is - I had never coded Audio or DSP before. They liked my technology surfing history, that wide 'T' shaped profile on LI. And, clearly, age had nothing to do with it. Experience, proven adaptability, and quick at learning new stuff did. Is my theory, anyway. But that is not something one can decide to add to the CV in a panic after the fact of layoffs. It starts in ones' teens and never stops.

But then, this is an established Japanese company in Seattle. Two major differences to SV start-ups.

My impression is that the industry is changing... not really in the tools we use (UNIX is older than I am; we keep re-hashing some combination of C and lisp, it seems that virtualization tech is on a one decade cycle. It's the same shit, new packaging) - no, the industry is changing because more "normal people" are entering it. Standards are going up in terms of expectations of things like social skills, being tall, good looking, etc, etc, all the things you'd expect to need to succeed in sales or management or other things that a normal person might do. My observation of my unemployed friends; the sort of people who were seriously into computers in the early to mid '90s, is that they are generally rejected on "cultural fit" grounds. "You aren't cool enough to work here"

I mean, it's still way easier in tech than in sales, for a person with poor social skills or poor confidence, a man who is short, or someone who is plain ugly, but every year, the vast difference between sales and engineering seems to be shrinking. It's pretty dramatic, really, because when I started in the '90s, it seemed like this was the haven for people who were not welcome anywhere else. Being smart enough to do the job excused a lot of negative attributes that would not have been excusable in other fields.

This is with bay area startups. Outside the bay area I can't say... but because I'm not in the bay area and all interaction with them was remote I can say there was a comparison to be made.

It's the dipthong startups that are the problem-- these kids these days don't know nothing about technology and believed Mark Zuckerberg on the Startup School stage in 2007 when he said "Don't hire anyone over 30 years old! Young people just get it." (paraphrasing, but I was there, it was obvious he had no understanding of the concept of wisdom.)

Anyway, discrimination means you miss out on the best people-- and at least according to my employers, they're pretty grateful to have me.

But pebble, digital ocean, and the like... they can't see past the grey beard.

"Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can't Get Hired in Bay Area Technology Companies and Startups as an Industry Moves On."

"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."

Cites: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/older-entrepreneurs-... ; http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...

My advice to all of you - young or old - is never forget to learn new things. Always have at least 5% of your stack of things, to do with learning something new. Software development is not a 'career': its an art form. There will always be new states of the art, and as an evolving process, will necessarily involve abandoning the old and continuing with the new.

Nobody cares if you're old. Everybody cares if you've been doing it for 30 years and still can't write a parser, or compile a new library, or spend 8 hours to hack up some code in a new language that nobody knows about yet. Keep that stuff up, newbies and old-folks alike .. its the only way forward.

I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products, hoping they will stick. These guys built a CAD product on the cloud called Onshape, check out their engineering team - https://www.onshape.com/team

There is this sense that many problems are unique to one industry when they are shared across many.

I'm an expert-level python, web, and javascript dev, with wide experience in admin and QA as well. In my 40s, up to date, and a much better developer than I was a decade ago.

This wasn't much of a conscious choice, it was just the way it panned out for me early on but after 21 years in IT and only 1.5 years of that in 'permanent' employment, I feel glad that this way of working has forced me to chop and change roles, technologies and sectors so that I have done UNIX/Linux SA, DBA and storage work and have had some recent AWS/ansible experience too.

If I had stayed at my first 'enterprise' role, I could probably be in some management role now or be in a technical role that would have made me hard to employ elsewhere too. I'm much happier that I think I now have a record of varied experience showing I can pick up new stuff.

Languages, tools, and frameworks evolve (including the brand new distributed programming language I invented, 'Hello', available at http://www.amsdec.com/).

But good software architecture and engineering is an art that improves with time.

But on the hardware aspect, I would think there is hope. Given the increasing move towards the new maker mode of desktop fabrication & IoT, there should be demand for people with hardware skill sets that integrate well with web, cloud & mobile.

The problem always remains that the smartest minds are frequently poor at marketing themselves.

1. Market yourself so that when you hit the pay ceiling, you can move into consulting/freelancing with enough of a name for yourself that you can justify your rates to businesses.

2. Move into management. If you hate marketing, start looking for management/mentoring opportunities now so that your next promotion/job has some sort of manager title, which will continue your mobility up to the Director -> VP -> C-level.

Obviously these fields move slower than tech but would be fascinating to see what could be put together to broadly engage and keep technical people (self included) on their toes.

Mix the curriculum between the applied (new languages / dbs / OS), emerging market exposure (vr / crypto currency / self driving), and the novel (snapchat / vine / etc).

"stay on the cutting edge".

Ha! The real leading edge is work that is at least "new, correct, and significant" and published in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in information technology, yes, and also powerful and valuable in practice.

So, put on resume that have published in original mathematical statistics for detecting zero-day problems, in artificial intelligence, and in optimization, and still get silence. With Silicon Valley, leading edge has no connection with peer-reviewed original research!

So, do a startup. Web development? Taught myself -- the Web page code works fine. The difficulty was a lot of poorly written documentaiton. The software was fast, fun, and easy.

"Leading edge"? Yup -- my startup is based on some original applied math I derived, complete with theorems and proofs. Likely and apparently I'm the only person in the world who understands that work. Definitely leading.

The problem my work solves, a lot of people have regarded as important. So far, I have the only good solution. Some of the people trying to solve the problem say that the solution I have is impossible -- they didn't understand what the heck they were talking about. They couldn't come up with a counterexample why not or a theorem of why can. The people just were not very good.

Problem is, really, leading is not what Silicon Valley is looking for. They wouldn't know the real stuff about leading if it slapped them in the face. My best published papers, nearly no one in Silicon Valley has the prerequisites to read, and likely no one outside of Stanford or Berkeley and only a few people there.

Instead of leading, they want two years of experience in just what the heck low grade, routine, simple minded, poorly documented API or OSS they are struggling with today.

Those people are being self-taught on their way to the leading edge and are floundering around and stand not to get to the leading edge. E.g., they keep saying Bayesian and power law but don't know the difference between the weak and strong laws of large numbers or about conditional expectation, non-parametric hypothesis tests, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, anything about martingales, the Neyman-Pearson lemma, etc., enough about conditioning even to understand the definition of a Markov process, a basic result such as

E[E[Y|X]] = E[Y]

the role of sigma algebras, or any such things.

Early in my career, I started in computing and started to get self-taught in the often associated applied math. I made good progress in some things but otherwise floundered around with low quality materials, etc.

Then I went for a good Ph.D. and got one. Now I can say, nearly no one in Silicon Valley startups is in any significant sense even near the leading edge and, instead, they are just floundering around.

Back to my startup -- a few good days and I should be able to go live.

I'll try to explain it.

1. 20 years ago we were called "computer geeks". Young people fond of computers. This term does not apply anymore. Now everyone under 20 is a computer geek.

My daughter is 5. You know what 5-yo kids draw in school ? User interfaces. That's right. Checkboxes and buttons and sliders. They don't know what they are called, but they know how to use them. Every day they draw UIs and computers and they play with them at school, then they come home and interact with their tablets.

But that is the coming generation. Today, even if you've never seen a computer, you can catch on pretty quickly, because:

2. There is almost no entry barrier into the profession. After a month of tutorials and interview training you can get a job as a junior developer. In fact, there're so many learning opportunities right now that it doesn't seem fair. Anyone anywhere can learn to do what you do - and better, because he can learn from the best. And they can produce better code faster, because:

3. Services like Github have trivialised code sharing and reuse.

Each library solves some kind of problem. Before, it required days or even months of work and research. Now, it's just a 'pod install' or 'npm install' .

But it's good, right ? It's so much easier to develop software now... That's true, however, given the way things are evolving: 3.1. If it has any 'general-purpose' value, what you're working on right now is (or will soon be) obsolete, because someone else will release it as an open source lib. Good for everyone, not as good for all the programmers who would have been paid to develop their version of it.

Of course, we can ride the wave and try to keep current with all that's happening, right ? Well, turns out that's not so trivial anymore, because:

4. The field has become extremely wide and each area is an ocean in itself. Take 'the backend' : there are dozens of languages and frameworks, each of them being updated weekly. Or iOS Development. Machine learning ? Computer vision ? Sound engineering ? .... You did notice this didn't you ?

And if that isn't enough food for thought, then

5. AI will eat our lunch pretty soon. Maybe 5, maybe 10 years from now, there will be no 'programmers', because everyone will be a programmer. The tools, libraries and techniques will be sufficiently advanced for anyone to speak the requirements and design ideas and the AI will write all the underlying code.

AI combined with the 5 year olds of today who are already doing UX design.

Note that this wasn't the case 5-10 years ago. Before the iPhone, Github, Khan academy and Coding Bootcamps, the industry was a different beast. What the future holds is of course unknown, but the signs are that 'programming' is not a skill that will feed you for the rest of your life. Time to think about other things you're good ;).