I think though the secret is to keep your skills up to date, which from friends and colleagues of the same era is not that common. Likewise I think keeping what I call a 'young' attitude - being open to new things, keep learning etc - is very important. (I know a lot of curmudgeons :-))
I'm not looking for work and I keep getting calls from people and agents
When this boom ends, the 40+ should expect to be the first cut. Again. Just like in 1992, 2001, 2008, ...
Again - didn't happen, did have to reduce my rate for a short time once or twice. I used the opportunity to stuff my resume a bit.
I've known a few guys that have had tough times in downturns, but they've usually had experience in stuff that was obsolete and haven't kept their skills current. e.g. I knew a guy who was an oracle DBA for 30 years, the writing has been on the wall for this for years, I got out of it a long time before, but he was getting paid well and just kept his head in the sand, sure enough one day it dried up.
It's not like your fifty and have no useful skills, but any one with no useful skills regardless of age will find things tough in a downturn. If you're any age and have good skills then you'll get a job.
What I'm trying to say it's not an age thing, its a relevant skills thing. If you have entry level skills because all the stuff you've done is no longer useful, then you'll be competing in a job market against graduates and yes, you're going to have a bad time.
I've been an assembler programmer, a forth programmer, a progress programmer etc and if I'd stuck to them blindly years ago then things would have been bad. Now I'm a swift and C# programmer who does agile and things are good and will be for the next few years, if things change then, change you must. There's no point in arguing with it.
Indeed if you're fifty and have skills that are current plus years of industry experience then I'd argue the opposite - if you come up against a new graduate with the same experience at the same price,and you have all this other experience on top then who'd say no?
What happens if "everyone" does it and now you compete not with a few but with hundreds, thousands? Will you still do and feel so good? Does your suggestions scale if it is applied not just to a few? What makes you think you can just multiply your particular personal situation by [insert any number here] and it will still work?
The attitude of 'if everyone does well, then it makes my life harder' I find regrettable. Again, I suspect this is a minority view.
Edit: Imagine the situation where education is freely available, where people have a life long love of learning. Where companies allow their employees to go to classes of all sorts. Wouldn't that be a great world. The one we have now is sort of the opposite. The strange part is this could all be done now, all it takes is a political will. Damn commies I suppose.
In 2001, the dot com bust was just that - a bust of companies with no real business model and no profits. The local tech scene outside of the west coast didn’t even whiff. Corporations were still hiring staff developers to support their internal processes.
Between 2008-2011, I was already over 35 and older than most of the developers that were at the company I worked for. They let go of many of the younger less experienced developers during the time but by then I was the most experienced C# developer, the only experienced C++/MFC developer after they fired the founder, and the only one with the maturity to lead my own projects, do SOWs, and talk to our remaining customers.
Ten years later, I work for another small company, I’m in my mid 40s and I doubt very seriously that I won’t be the last to get laid off if it comes to that. I now have project management experience, I can jump between the three languages we use, and we are an AWS shop and I’m the most experienced (and certified) AWS person. I can also jump back and forth between development, Devops, and netops.
I’m not bragging, after 20+ years as a professional developer working at small companies, you pick up a diverse skillset.
Either there are cuts to meet cost expectations, which kills high paid management first, or there are cuts by quota. When they come by quota its the people perceived as providing the least value, which is not always connected with work ethic. People who manage necessary legacy systems have greater value than a hard working easily replaceable young guy.
- management always looks after management
- individuals job performance is irrelevant if an entire location or business line is closing
- sacking key workers then discovering it after the fact and paying far more for contractors/outsourcing is common
Whether the older or the younger ones get cut first can vary, based on various factors, and probably will vary in future too.
In 2001 downturn (which was due to the dot-com bust and post 9/11), I've read that a lot of younger ones were cut first. That was reportedly because they had only one or so skill, e.g. Java (during the boom, cos. were hiring and sending to the US, people who had a few weeks of Java on their resume, they were that desperate for people), while older people often had a good mix of skills (e.g. some language, some DB, some OS, some libs, s/w engg. skills, etc., so it was higher VFM (Value For Money) to retain them), so were fired less and later. In the dot-com boom that just preceded the bust (read up on the details somewhere or ask those who know, those who don't know about it, the factors involved are too long to describe in a comment here), dotcos were flush with funds from VCs and even Wall Street types, and were throwing money at employees left and right. I've even heard that BMWs were on offer as a joining bonus (in the US, SF Bay Area). I myself (was in India) got some crazy high offers (e.g. had some years' experience in projects and with skills in a mix of in-demand technologies, did not consider myself experienced enough to be a CTO, but got an offer for that role from a Mumbai dotco for a giant sum), but did not take it seriously (although I'll admit I was tempted and considered it a bit) and did not go for it, thankfully, as it later turned out. A junior guy I knew casually around that time, quit his fairly good job to join one of those frothy (literally in a sense, in this case, called (no comment) freshlimesoda.com). I think the excesses on this front (as exemplified by that name and business plan - remember Yo (later), anyone?) were even more in India then, than they were in the US (from what I could gather).
Conversely, in a previous (less-publicized bust), I was working as a Unix system engineer in a large national-level hardware+software company in India, and was quite junior. Soon after I joined, there was an industry "shakeout" (term used then) and several mid-level people were let go (both in India and the US, probably, in the industry as a whole). We juniors were mostly spared, though, except for the bottom of the barrel, who were sacked.
to join one of those frothy dotcos,
I meant. Sometimes my tendency to parenthesize overwhelms me, and I drop some words as a result. (Maybe I was a Lisper in a previous life)
See what I did there? :)