Hacker News Reader

Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. I'm 44, a principal engineer at $BigTechCo, and I know people in mid 50s that are very in demand and will remain gainfully employed as long as they want to.

The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. This will serve you fine for a decade or two, but if you're in your mid 40s and you're only comfortable with technology from the late 90s, your job prospects will be limited.

In order to have a long career in tech, you need to constantly be learning new technologies, frameworks, and languages. If you don't, you can coast for a while, but don't act all surprised at 50 when you get laid off and can't find any work. Would you honestly expect to be able to find work as a VAX/VMS engineer now if that was what you started working with right out of college and never learned UNIX, Linux, or Wintel?

View on HN

My first real job out of college was the end of the 80s, as a contractor at IBM. This was when they were really going down the tubes, and I saw them lay off literally my entire department except for me (my contract had already been paid for the whole year, so they still owned me). On one hand, I saw that IBM management was actually doing everything they could for those folks - I saw managers on the phones all day, trying to find jobs for their employees.

But on the other hand, I saw all these people whose only skills were COBOL and RPG3, and even back then those technologies were obsolete. They'd been getting large salaries from IBM primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge, and when IBM stopped caring about those lines, the knowledge became worthless.

Seeing what this did to people that I had been working with, and friendly with, really made a big impression on me. I promised I wouldn't let myself get into that same technical debt - but these day's that's easier said than done.

I saw this first hand at British Telecom due to restructuring we had some one who had only done COBOL since they had joined the GPO.

They found Perl a challenge at first :-)

> primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge

This is a _HUGE_ loss to a company when a company loses someone with domain knowledge. Putting people into the "Are they good at skill X? Where X is the specific thing their title says they do." box and then hiring and firing based solely upon X is foolish to the extreme. If someone is mediocre at X but understands the business domain that they are working in they are worth the same as someone who is highly talented at X but doesn't know the domain. And while people can "learn the domain" most people don't actually want to. They'll learn it until they have passing knowledge but won't actually ever take the time to really understand it.

I was an intern at IBM in the EARLY 80s. At that time, people actually had the expectation of lifetime employment at IBM (as long as you were willing to relocate as needed). A project had just been cancelled when I arrived, and everyone in the department would come in every day and drink coffee and read the paper for 8 hours, waiting for the company to figure out how to re-deploy them. Not a care in the world about a lay off. In the end of the 80s when you showed up, the lay off must have been a huge shock.

Nope, I'm near expert-level in Python3 and recent JS, with well-rounded platform and industry experience and it still took me a year to get hired last time. Didn't work so well for the guy in the article, did you read it?

Ageism isn't the only problem though, just as big is that no one will allow you to learn on the job. With the explosion of tech stacks it should be a requirement, but the opposite is true. Tech interviews under the gun are another.

Agreed. If you keep up to date (hey, who needs spare time). If you have marketable skills all over the stack. If you are persistent, then eventually you can find something. Possibly something really good if there's the right scarcity/odd set of skills only picked up with a lot of experience/we need this now opportunity.

But then there's all the other times when they look at you as if you were a speaking monkey...

Everybody thinks its easy when the times are good.

You also need to be honest about what your criteria is for a job search. Are you expecting to find a 6 figure job for a rockstar 10x Python/JS engineer in Podunk, Iowa?

Come to any of a dozen cities that have a decent tech representation and you won't need a year to get an offer. And I'm not talking about SF or NY, you can go to places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, or Boise.

True, to be relevant you need to stay up to date.

One of the pains in staying up to date in tech is that learning Perl then java then javascript then python and whatever comes next and the corresponding frameworks seems like a big hamster wheel. You pretty much are doing the same thing you're just learning new ways to do it -not necessarily better.

It seems like you're writing the same term paper over and over again. After a while, it loses its luster.

If I could do it again I would choose a career where gaining knowledge adds to your mastery. In info. tech, it's a lateral move and you have to keep learning or you sink.

Funny, I look at it very differently. After 25+ years as a professional polyglot... I feel like I can spin the hamster wheel with my pinkie. No, I haven't used that particular language/framework/whatever, but give me a week and I'll be as good as anyone on the team. There's not much new under the sun.

Same here, but that won't get you hired. Need to code under Swordfish conditions, have 5 years demonstrable experience in Framework_v2018, and hit the ground running!

Sure it will, at least at anyplace that could afford me. And hiring for specific framework knowledge is a big red flag anyway.

I've also got 25+ years of contacts. I have to think that talented older developers who struggle with employment must have been antisocial in their careers. I cringed when the guy in TFA apparently threw a sandwich at a fast food worker - maybe there are some deeper personality issues at play besides just being old. It's no less sad, of course.

Personally, worked remote for a long time and it negatively affected my network before I realized it. In the 90s I could get a job within a month and networking wasn't as absolutely vital as now.

Re the article, I suspect a baseline anger built up over being unemployed so long. That can lead to small injustices being blown out of proportion. Similar has happened to me in different areas over the years so can relate.

That might be true for lower-level positions and short-term contracts, but it's also not a big deal. If you are out of work for a month you can learn one of the new techs and be as productive in it as a overall less experienced developer who's been using it for years.

When you find clients by word of mouth they rarely even ask for your CV - it's just "can you do this?".

Nope, I'm often up for senior Django positions and such. I've been using mostly Flask for a few years so will often not be able to answer highly specific questions about Django.

Once I did well with the first generic question, do not filter in application code, do it in database. (Thought that was 10x more important than any library question.) Next question how to access a field with F(). Needed to look at stack overflow, did within a few mins. No offer.

Also, they will ask questions across multiple fields which can't all be studied for. One Java Spring shop asked exclusively database questions after I spent weeks brushing up on Java Spring. Could only answer 90% of the questions, not bad considering. Even had a friend on the inside. No offer.

Think about all the pass/fail exams at University with two surprise questions from any technical field. Oh yeah, doesn't exist because it would be absurd.

It's endemic, bad interviews and coderpad.io. If you've got a network you can skip most of it, perhaps why many have not realized how bad it is from the outside.

At my last job, I was in the room when my boss interviewed a new candidate. My job was to guide the new candidate with the paid homework that was to be returned for all the team to evaluate. He did not believe in the Q and A tech interview. He felt it was unfair and mostly useless.

The one thing he always did was disqualify any candidate that could not answer the basic questions about our in-house stack. If you did not know at least the basics, my boss moved on to the next candidate.

Fair or unfair it did not matter. He had enough experience to know that it takes time for people to learn a new framework and language plus our in-house procedures. It was always more productive to grab someone with experience.

I suspect most employers think the same way.

At one time, employers would take a chance and time to bring someone up to speed since it was harder to find the right person. The developer pool has expanded so much that now it's easier to find someone with experience.

One should be able to live and thrive in a society without staying "relevant". If relevance is the measure for "we give you enough resources to live and enjoy life" then it is not the right society.

From my early teens to my late 20's, I spent a lot of free time coding. JS/HTML/CSS then Perl then PHP then Python then Node (so back where I started in a weird sense). I didn't program professionally until I was thirty.

But now I actually like to play with my kid and travel when I'm not at work, and it's painfully obvious when people say "hey try a bit of Rust or Go or whatever" they don't mean on work hours.

This is a bit problematic, too, because I use Node all day long and I suspect it will not be a technology with a long future.

Hmm, don't know your work environment, but even at the most "fast paced" (ie poorly managed) places one can still squeeze a few hours a week to hack on a small research project.

It's part of a software engineer's job to evaluate technologies and no one so far has chided me for doing so. Only the most cynically bad kind of manager would try, and some of those can be convinced otherwise when the utility explained.

> The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills.

You hit the nail on the head here.

There's no shortage of new frameworks to learn. To paraphrase Tony Soprano: "You could build a jetty with what's coming out."

I take your point, but Unix does predate the Vax.

Agreed, but UNIX remains relevant, or at least easily transferrable to Linux, while Vax remains a niche platform.

Vax Management System is predecessor of Windows: the New Technology (aka NT).

While that's conceptually true, there is little transferable skills between the two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com