Sucks to be an old engineer

It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills.

I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012.

I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.

This post is touching on two issues that are somewhat related but different:

1. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard;

2. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in favour of twentysomethings.

Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years.

(1) is a pretty strong driver for everyone having a long term plan to control your own fate, which means working for yourself. That is, if you're not in industry with inbuilt protections (eg teaching).

(2) is harder to pin down.

On the one hand, there is a certain (un)survivor bias in that many who started as engineers in their 20s are managers or the like by their 40s. So are those who remain in engineering a good sample?

Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have. Family, for example. This can reduce the amount of time you spend on self-improvement. This industry almost requires constant learning, reinvention and skill acquisition. Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?

It's often said that a good technical foundation and education means you can pickup any language. This is true but picking up new skills is both a habit and a skill, one that atrophies if left untapped (IMHO). It's also a question of degree. Perl to Python? Not a big gap. Ada to Ruby? Well....

That all being said, there is age discrimination in this industry. I've personally witnessed someone say "I prefer new grads so I can mold them". That's fine and all but if you say that and don't hire a 50 year old programmer that's a good basis for an age discrimination suit because, well, it is age discrimination.

So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.

This is known.

I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground.

That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people.

In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely.

I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.

This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk):

1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3) Start a company.

My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).

So here's what the article says:

"I know two or more engineers around the age of 60 that graduated from MIT or Stanford 35 years ago. Of those two or more, at least one has lost his job, and at least one is afraid of losing his job."

Here's what the article doesn't say: what field these engineers are in, whether or not they're good at their job, what company they work(ed) for, what they work on, how up-to-date their knowledge is, etc.

Maybe there is age discrimination in the engineering field, but you certainly can't infer that from this anecdote.

"""When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly."""

Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?

The first book I co-authored on Android programming is already so obsolete it is in O'Reilly's repository of free downloads - the back list of the back list.

SICP, which, when it was published, summed up a lot of what I had learned as an undergrad. Nobody reads it to write a mobile app. Since I read it, I had jobs or book contracts that depended on knowledge of LISP machines, bit slice, the original Macintosh OS, Windows telephony API, edge routers, core routers trying to be edge routers, J2ME, Linux on ARM, and Android. Android will be around another 10 years, maybe a bit more or less, and it too will be a museum piece.

My shortest trajectory from zero to Noted Authority and back to zero was when I had a book contract to write about Visual J++. Thank you, Sun's lawyers, for that short trip.

All that said, if you don't know anything about project management tools, estimating market size, or how to write, or critique, a cash flow and P&L projection, your knowledge is going to be hard to package in a form that has high value.

I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?

And engineer in his 60 will be worth his weight in gold just for knowing all the ways a project can fail and all the unknown unknowns that can bite you in the ass.

And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under the hood.

That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will hire him in a second given the chance.

Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class reunion to be a great networking opportunity. And, of course, my time has a low opportunity cost. Conversely, am I willing to fly across the country for the weekend if I'm working a lot and need to be in the office on Monday morning? Also, those whose lives at age 60 aren't all that fulfilling professionally or otherwise might be more likely to attend a reunion where the could be reminded of better times. [I say this as someone excited to attend my 20 year high school reunion this summer.] A survey of Stanford engineering graduates done by random selection would be much more interesting.

I've witnessed the exact opposite. My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before reaching 60.

OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer, because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.

What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.

This article is incredibly terse and uninformative. Why are older engineers having such a hard time? Are they keeping up with new technologies to remain competitive? What kind of engineering are we even talking about?

The hard thing is "keeping your skills current".

Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer.

The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older.

There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything.

I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"

One of the best engineers I have worked with is on his 60's. When I worked with him, the rest of the engineering team had an average age of 23 or so (me being 32), but this guy could give everyone a run for their money. This is not about age, but about staying current and sharp. Keep learning, and you won't have this issue. Sure, a guy fresh out of school has a ton of energy and works crazy hours, but as an Engineering Manager and Product Manager I knew that if I needed something to be really done on time I could always trust the older (and quite frankly way smarter) guy.

This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but reading comments to some other posts on this blog almost made my jaw drop.

"The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast, especially NYC. "

lolwut

TL;DR if you spend 35 years as an engineer, you'll still need to work for a living, but if you spend 35 years as an entrepreneur or VC, you'll likely be retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the pyramid than working for someone at the top.

Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me as bullshit.

At any age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then that's a different problem.

New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as long as you've got something to contribute.

Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone immediately awesome.

Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.

One datapoint from Chicago: Got laid off at age 56 last year and had two offers within two weeks. But I interviewed at several other places without receiving an offer whereas in the past I almost always got an offer if I got an interview (Google excepted). Here is some speculation about why my batting average dropped. I do feel that age worked against me but I don't think it was because of the companies having institutional biases against hiring older people. Rather, I think it was just the mindsets of individual 20-something/30-something interviewers making individual decisions based on what felt comfortable, based on the vibe feeling ok. Nobody here is doing anything wrong.

There is active discrimination against older engineers. I should know, I'm on many interview/screening rounds.

My stepfather is in this situation, just turned 66 and has told me on several occasions, shit, the writing's on the wall, can't compete with the young guns.

Of course, he's been in the business since the punch card days and has a huge amount of experience to draw on; as such, he's miraculously (to me) been able to land guaranteed 60 hour per week gigs (even though he likely only works 30 hours) at $125+ per hour.

K-rist, that is a skill in itself, landing high paying telecommute gigs and putting in half the hours you're paid for, the f-er ;-)

Newton's First Law of Motion. Keep moving, stay moving. Keep eating healthy and exercising, stay healthy and fit. Keep learning, stay sharp and knowledgeable.

There are more life frictions as we age that dissuade us from continually learning. If you realize this and work against it, there is no way someone significantly younger than you can realistically be a better fit for a job. They may have knowledge, but you'll have that and decades more experience and wisdom.

On the internet, nobody has to know how old you are. Or at least this was the case, before people started posting every personal detail of themselves online.

The blog's author, later in the comments section, doing a great impersonation of my mother (sans the anti-immigrant bit):

All of the smartest Americans are going into more lucrative fields like finance, medicine, and law. As much as you think the creme-of-the-crop engineers are getting paid, they aren’t making as much as investment bankers, and even the best computer programmers don’t make as much money as an average surgeon.

The market is flooded with mediocre Indians willing to work cheap, and that’s what every IT department wants, cheap labor.

It amazes me that people can still say things like this in post-crisis America. As if finance, which is still reeling, isn't already flooded with Indians and Asians with tech backgrounds, as if they aren't in law (horrifying debt, anemic job market) and medicine (even more horrifying debt, massive commitment) as well.

Hell, I wonder if the quote here, supposedly from the WSJ comments section, is even real, or if he's just looking to rile people up.

Ageism in engineering, especially software engineering, is a real issue worthy of vigorous debate, but I'd like to think there are better pieces we can argue around than this dubious anecdote.

"Engineer" is a fairly vague term. Once you are 60, you have probably "graduated" to a higher-level engineering job that involves more consulting/management/planning and less gruntwork. If you still enjoy the gruntwork aspect (I do, at times), more power to you. Either way, anyone involved in a programming-related job should always keep themselves up to date by getting their hands dirty once in a while.

A 40 year old degree in anything alone isn't good enough to stay employed in any field. Except maybe teaching.

Age discrimination is sometimes even publicly announced. For example European Space Agency has age limit for recruitment 55 years. This applies even to desk based jobs such as administrative or software developement.

Extract from job description:

- The European Space Agency is an equal opportunity employer

- Contracts Officer in the Procurement Department, Directorate of Procurement, Financial Operations and Legal Affairs

- preparing requests for offers/invitations to tender;

- dealing with administrative, contractual, legal and industrial problems arising from the procurements concerned.

- Under ESA Regulations, the age limit for recruitment is 55.

More at: http://www.esa.int/hr/PDF/ESA-VN-ESTEC-2012-091,REV.1.pdf

This article starts from a personal experience (with a really small social circle) and generalize to everyone. Worse, it generalizes to "engineering" which has wild and quite different fields.

If you have worked on Cobol or Fortran when you were 25 year-old, these things don't exist anymore (or enough to employ these old developers).

Otherwise, just put yourself in the place of the recruiter. I guess, except for special fields like Medicine, Law...; in most of the fields this ageism is the same.

If you want to have a builder, would you prefer a 65, 20 or 30? Certainly, you'll pick 30. He has more experience than 20 and way more energy than 65.

No one's really mentioned that keep up to date or learn a new skill is great advice...but it sucks when someone's tells you that you only have six months with MongoDB and Node.Js, so we only want to pay you for a Junior position. This is where the ageism comes into play, where a young 22 year old who doesn't have the experience because of a new technology buzzword looks attractive to the hiring manager. Seen this move a lot.

"But what about all my experience with I/O Completion Ports and multi-threaded server development mastering mutexes and slinging semaphores!?

SLAPs OP in the face come to your senses man! Old is wise harness your skills to develop new ones. The dodo that can not fly shall go extinct no matter what the profession.

I live in SV and am in my early 40s and can only comment on what I've seen firsthand or heard about secondhand. Based on that, I don't really see ageism. I work with people in their 20s, and I work with people in their 60s. It can be harder to find a new job at comparable pay as you get older, but it has a lot more to do with the following:

(1) Salary expectations. Somebody works at the same company for 20 years, gets an annual raise that's above the rate of inflation, and has an expectation that if they go someplace else, they're going to get as much or more money.

This might happen, but it's not guaranteed. I've worked at companies in other industries where it was common for people to work at those companies for 30+ years, then retire. These companies have different notions as far as annual raises and how generous the perqs and bonuses should be, because they expect people to be around for a long time.

Tech companies tend to be a lot more generous, because there are much higher turnover rates and they have to work harder to retain talent. The result is that after 10 or 20 years at a tech company, you may become accustomed to getting paid above your market value (I hope to have that problem someday :). This isn't always the case, but it does happen.

(2) Lack of relevant technical minutiae. Everybody loves to say things like, "it doesn't matter what you know, it's your capacity to learn!" Or, "my knowledge of abstract CS concepts means I can pick up the technical minutiae associated with a learning a new language/library/platform/etc. in no time!" All of these things are true to an extent, and you're not going to get very far without them. However, none of them have anything to do with actually accomplishing anything- they're all just modifiers to your ability to learn and adapt, prior to accomplishing anything.

Unfortunately, accomplishing anything requires technical minutiae. Some of it is more widely applicable stuff like programming in a particular language or using certain tools, but the stuff that makes you really really valuable to your current employer is more likely to be the niche that you carve out for yourself over the years. This means, knowledge of specific codebases, and domain-specific knowledge, some of which might be from other disciplines like math or finance or electrical engineering. When you go someplace new, your niche knowledge is either going to be invaluable (yay!) or meaningless (bummer :( ). Most of the time, it's the latter. So, again, this is a case where through no fault of their own, someone has ended up getting paid a lot of money for doing a great job, by acquiring lots of valuable skills that don't mean much outside of that company and position.

(3) Burnout. Sometimes people just get sick of spending so much time around computers after 20 or 30 years (or 5-10!). They lose their enthusiasm and aren't as motivated to keep up to date. If you're burned out on your profession, you will have a harder time finding new work, for any number of reasons. It's unfortunate but it happens to everyone at some point or another, maybe many times throughout their career. Some people find ways to renew their interest and get out of this mindset, some don't. Older people are more susceptible to this because they have more important things in their lives (like family).

TLDR: don't get frustrated, try to see things from a prospective employer's point of view in addition to your own POV, and keep your skills sharp and up to date. Don't coast. Stay curious and make sure you're still having fun doing what you do. If you're no longer curious or no longer enjoy it, see if you can come at it from a different angle and rejuvenate your interest. If not, you'd probably be happier taking a left turn in your career anyway, doing something completely different.

Any blog starting with a immigrates take our jobs implication is not really something to note IMO.

But anyway if you're an engineer and can't retire by 60 then you've done something wrong.

Just don't blow your money on stupid stuff.

And by retire at 60, that can mean anything, work for free for a charity, do a simple start up, work part time.

Here's his follow up post that responds to comments in this thread: http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/follow-...

I've seen plenty of developers in their 30's unable to work because they were a one-language pony, and that language was no longer needed in the marketplace.

"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

In what field of engineering is this person trying to find employment?

So what's a good backup plan as you age?

I see our age discrimination problem as the fundamental sign of us being a defeated tribe. Ageism is one of those horrible traits of management culture (i.e. if you have a younger boss, you're a loser) that we wouldn't face if we had kept our tribal integrity (because "bosses" would be coordinators and mentors, not hierarchical superiors, making age irrelevant.)

Good programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-haired badasses. (Ok, old bad programmers are annoying, but so are young bad programmers.) Ageism is a managerland prejudice. What the fuck is that shit doing in our industry?

Most of us are intellectual whores: massively overqualified for the work we're assigned to do, but hired because it makes the boss feel important to be able to say things like, "I have four Ivy Leaguers working for me" even when the work could be done by one script-kiddie. Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts.

It's perverted. When you're young, it's hard as hell to get a good job but getting a job is easy. But that's exactly when you care about getting the good jobs that will build your career. When you're old and have actual use for the crappy jobs (you need to sustain an income) you can't get them; and if you were sidetracked by taking too many crappy jobs (and that's not hard to have happen) you're not qualified for the good ones either.

I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance.

ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other (better) alternatives.

If you think being an old engineer is tough, try being a new one.