Reinvented in His 60s, After 26 Jobless Months | Hacker News Reader

Reinvented in His 60s, After 26 Jobless Months

nytimes.com

119 pointsgdilla69 comments

I had a friend who committed suicide in his early sixties after three years of not being able to land a decent position. He was amazingly qualified to do a ton of things. Age discrimination was at play here.

He actually went back to school and kept a positive attitude through all of it. He'd come over to my office and we'd have long chats. I'd get him involved in what I was doing and did my best to keep him motivated. I even paid for a two week Solidworks course hoping to help open new doors for him. I would give him access to my machine shop and shoved him into the world of modern mechanical design and manufacturing.

In the end he could not cope with no longer being "useful" and took his own life before finishing the course. I had no idea and saw no sign of what was going on in his mind.

I still can't believe the loss.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that.

It sucks because he was my mentor as I grew as an engineer. Everywhere I look I find examples of what he taught me. Some of my thinking was molded by him. I have little engineering sayings and rules of thumb I got from him. Another friend of mine is the same. When we get together we invariably go into examples of how last week or last month we did X and it reminded us of him. I guess in a small way that makes him live on in our minds through what we do professionally every day.

you may want to read this: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/ElderlyWhiteMenAfflictedbyH...

I recently went to a talk given in Seattle given by a person who was on the 2nd place team in the Netflix Prize competition. The talk was amazing, but I also found the speaker quite interesting.

He had graduated from a top school in the 70s. Worked in chemistry throughout the 80s, 90s and early 00s. Then he decided to go back to school and get a CS degree since his field wasn't as promising as it once was.

He decided that the Netflix prize was a great way to test his education in machine learning, and he jumped right in, and ended up working with a great team.

Since ageism is a concern for a lot of people in tech, I was quite happy to see someone thriving, even after such a late career pivot. I'm not sure we can all be as sharp and energetic as this particular person is late in our careers, but it did give me hope that there will still be a place for us when we're 50+ or 60+. Not that anyone reading this isn't 100% sure they'll be retired by 35. :p

Ageism, to me, is the ultimate sign that engineers are still a conquered people. See, age is an issue for smooth-talking sales douches, because every career accomplishment in their world gets harshly age-graded, but shouldn't be in ours. Ours should be about substance, not image. If I need to evaluate a cool new technology, do I give a rat's ass if the author was 17 or 73? Of course not. I just care about how the thing works.

A few years back I interviewed a mixed race post-operative transsexual for a developer position in our startup. At that point in my life, I had not been exposed to much diversity at all.

The candidate had been referred by a friend of mine who offered the personal bio ahead of time, probably to filter out any polite but intolerant employers. Before the interview started I forcefully reminded myself to keep an open mind and conduct the interview as I would any other.

Half way through the interview it sort of suddenly dawned on me that I really didn't care, at all, about this person's personal orientation, preferences or lifestyle; as long as they could code, I would be happy to have them on board (as a co-worker and friend, as co-workers tend to become in such close quarters). And I felt intuitively confident that my co-founder would feel the same way. A lot of folks probably repeat this sentiment every day, but I wonder in how many industries they really, truly mean it. I think tech is a very special industry in terms of its ability to focus on substance, as you say, over form or perception.

Good on you for being open-minded. Also, diversity bingo!

This is why we're always adamant that our first interview is a phone screen focused on a few coding problems and discussion about them. Yes, you can still tell some basic things like gender, accent, and so forth, but removing as much of the "first impression" BS that we can is important to us. We save the "culture fit" of the interview process to a later stage, while trying to provide as much transparency about our culture to our candidate as possible. We've ended up hiring some of our best employees that might have not done as well on an in-person interview this way. Yeah, these things shouldn't matter but they tend to. Well done for ignoring the unimportant and focusing on substance!

"broken tribe".

It really depends on what kind of engineering you do. My dad is 70, and is still a practicing mechanical engineer currently working for a space-equipment company. He is extremely well-regarded in the firm, even by people in their 20s. No one is writing up NYT puff pieces about him, but he is also not working in a hype-train industry like social media, so it's not considered unusual that an oldbie be such a high performer. (In mech eng, age is probably an advantage.)

When you try to get on the hype train, ageism is prevalent, but that's been as true of music and fashion for many decades as it is for network-related businesses.

In fields like mechanical engineering, I'd imagine the typical youthful bent is pretty much the opposite of what you need. The cost of failure makes "fail early, fail often" a really bad idea.

I worked designing flight control systems for the 757, fresh out of college. I worked at the direction of a couple of engineers who were in their late 50s. Man, they knew their stuff - what did and did not work. I was a real honor and privilege to work with them.

I also had the pleasure of showing how I could get better, more accurate designs by doing some FORTRAN programming as opposed to the older manual methods.

I think having old mixed with young, the new techniques and the old techniques, made for having a great team.

A good mix is definitely my ideal.

I think having old mixed with young, the new techniques and the old techniques, made for having a great team.

It's actually quite critical. The oldbies have learned things that were completely phased out of the newbies' curriculum. A few years ago my dad mentored university seniors working at their senior project; one of the things he complained about was that they were not taught how to machine a part. As a result they had little gut-level knowledge about details like tolerances. Since a mechanincal engineer's work output is instructions for a machinist, learning how the machinist does his job is essential to you doing yours, even if you spend next to no time on the job at a lathe or mill.

I really feel like the story behind the Netflix Prize particularly towards the final days would be a fascinating read. Three college friends of mine were also on the 2nd place team so I had some visibility into what was going from the start, and one of the interesting things that happened was that the teams kept merging over and over in an effort to beat the whizzes at AT&T labs (who got 1st place in the end by the slimmest of margins). By the end of it the 2nd place team was a very geographically distributed team, a conglomeration of several originally separate teams that had joined forces and shared their algorithms and techniques with one another to inch themselves forward.

http://www.the-ensemble.com/content/meet-team

Yes, I highly recommend it.

This talk was given by Jeff Howbert, and he gives it on a semi-regular basis at various meetups and conferences.

The biggest issue here in my eyes is 600 submitted resumes and only 3 interviews (2 by phone). Those numbers are astounding, and I'd have to guess that someone with his qualifications must have had some issues to compound any perceived issues with ageism.

Ageism is real, but I don't think we can attribute ageism and the down economy to a .5% response rate to a resume for a well-qualified individual. More likely some other reasons (I wrote about this issue last year here http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/08/06/why-you-didnt-get-the-...) contributed to the issue.

I'd be curious to see those 600 applications - the jobs, the resume, and whatever other material he sent. I find it hard to believe that his applications themselves wouldn't account for much of the lack of response.

Shouldn't you change up your strategy after, say, the 100th resume submission? It obviously wasn't working out!

To his credit, maybe he did change things around several times. My guess is that he did not, and just shotgun blasted resumes out with little forethought thinking that his qualifications would get people responding quickly. That method died years ago, probably around the time of his previous job search.

I've said this to many people, but you are better off investing that time writing targeted resumes and applications to even 20 companies than blasting out generic content to 600. Not sure if he did that, but it would make sense.

I'm also curious what his social network looks like.

Besides all of the other -isms in play, nepotism is really a huge part of getting your foot in the door in most places in this world. And I'm not even talking about "cushy job for the wastrel nephew" nepotism. While I'd like to think that I've gotten every job I've had because I was a competent, useful person, in almost every case I started the interview through someone I knew who worked there. The same goes for most people I know.

Even if you don't get the job based on who you know, just getting the interview based on who you know is a huge, fat advantage, straight-up nepotism. And the great thing about nepotism is that you tend to know people who are like you in one or more ways: same race, same gender, same socio-economic-background, same political views, or in this case, same age. It's all the other -isms wrapped up into one.

The more accurate word here is cronyism, indicating a contact and not necessarily a family member, but your point is valid.

Or simply networking--if we can get away from the isms. And, yes, for better or worse, knowing people matters. Every job I've had after my first ones out out of degree programs--I did something of a career shift through a grad degree early on--have been the direct result of calling someone I knew.

I recently did some work with a engineer who is 60+ and spends more time studying and keeping himself current than anyone I know.

It was eye-opening to me. Many if not most people I've met at that age willingly admit to having given up on learning new things years if not decades ago.

I was really inspired by this guy and hope to follow a similar path.

That's great. In his last lecture, Dr. Bose said that the average timespan of an engineer doing actual engineering was about 7 years because they get promoted and become managers. I hope to avoid this at all costs and keep practicing my craft until I die.

I would think leaving the field happens more than management promotions. Otherwise we'd have more managers than engineers.

It was six years before I moved from a practical to a strategic technology role, now at board level I try to keep my hand in but I don't really touch anything that customers see, I just write documents, have meetings and direct people.

I'm with you, but there are a couple of downsides I've observed with staying out of management:

* It can make moving between jobs harder. Career managers are scared to death of people who are more technical than they are and entirely capable of doing their jobs. Nothing can convince them that we don't actually want their jobs. They will see fit to undermine you at every turn.

* Moving permanently into management in ~10 years seems to be such a common career path that it raises questions when someone hasn't done it. "What's wrong with him/her?"

* Many if not most organizations are stuck in a mindset managers must be paid above those they manage. In some places it's hard and fast rule.

On a related note, one of the worst situations I've ever had to deal with was working for a guy who had stopped being anything remotely technical at least half a decade earlier, but refused to acknowledge it. It made for a fullblown career manager who steadfastly believed that he was still the best and brightest engineer in any room.

I recently reviewed a resume of someone who was 69 or 70 years old (I can't remember exactly) who had tons of older (cobol, fortran, et. al) and new (iOS, android) experience.

I was very impressed with how up-to-date he had kept himself.

And you didn't interview him?

That's happening in 38 minutes. :) It took a couple weeks for us to get our schedules to sync up.

My grandfather, a retired academic chemical engineer, is in his late eighties and applied for his latest patent late last year, along with publishing some papers in academic journals.

Am I the only one getting tired of articles behind the NY Times paywall getting submitted to HN?

No.

Chrome's incognito mode.

Try incognito/private browsing mode.

I agree, and I for one would gladly pay $15/month for a way to get around the paywall automatically without having to use incognito mode.

Shouldn't you be financially independent after a lifetime of working at above average professional wages?

Expensive habits are easy to acquire and hard to get rid of.

And a mistake to continue if you can't afford them. So, yes; he should be financially independent by now.

Life itself can be expensive depending upon individual circumstances.

There's no need to assume it was all to waste without knowing the details.

Ever been personally sued? Had medical bills beyond health insurance? Had a 401k or maybe a conservative investment go bankrupt?

There are many ways that one can be subjected to harsh financial realities.

They mentioned that he is divorced. Depending on how the judgements/settlements fall out, it can be pretty disastrous for your finances.

And he could have had kids, which are expensive to raise and send through college.

from previous article in 2009:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/fashion/30genb.html?pagewa...

MICHAEL BLATTMAN, 58, took a prudent path to a successful business career. Armed with an M.B.A., he started with the federal government, working at the General Accounting Office and Federal Reserve, before moving to the Sallie Mae student loan program, where he rose to be director of national sales.

From 2001 to 2008 he was a senior vice president for a private student-loan company and at his high point earned $225,000 a year in salary and bonuses, he says. He also taught business courses at the University of Maryland; lived in a 4,000-square-foot home in upscale Potomac, Md., and drove a Mercedes.

And then, in short order, this stable life came undone. When his younger of two children was almost ready for college, Mr. Blattman asked his wife of 25 years for a divorce.

“We’d just grown apart, we had a different opinion on mostly everything,” he says. “Life is short — you got to do what makes you happy.” Since he worked out of his home, he could live anywhere, and decided Florida would be the place to start over.

...

Moralizing doesn't help, nor does it add to the conversation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Yes you should.

Now ... what if you're not?

That was my first thought while reading this - and not only is he a business major - he teaches it.

I guess it's difficult to apply knowledge to one's own life. I know people who work in banks who have credit card debt.

At age 58, his life expectancy is around 20 years, and he could live 10 years or more beyond that, probably with rising care costs throughout. Once he leaves the workforce, voluntarily or involuntarily, he will be completely dependent on savings, retirement plans, and Social Security to support himself and any dependents. Staying in the workforce delays drawing down his savings, reducing the risk of running out of money at the far end---when he can't do a d-d thing about it. So, yeah, it makes sense that he wants to keep working, independent of whether he "should" be able to stretch his money.

I don't understand why so many are criticizing this guy; if he doesn't want to retire right now like it seems, why shouldn't he work for another few years until he's ready? Obviously increasing his savings in the meantime will do him well when he does decide to leave the workforce.

Am I missing the reinvention in this story? Man works for years in the loans business and as a lecturer in business courses to Americans in Maryland. Gets laid off, takes a couple of years but eventually finds a job first in the loans business and then as a lecturer in business courses, but gasp to Americans living in Germany!

It looks like he went from the VP of a student loan company to a lowly financial adviser at Merrill Lynch. He now teaches business courses in Germany, which he considers as his dream job.

I guess reinvention to you and I are vastly different than to the writer of this article. I, like you, don't see any retraining or new skills being developed to gain the new job. He just used another subset of resume (Phd) to get another job.

If anything, this article is showing how boomers, once making comfy 6-figure salaries, are now getting bumped down on the payscale (sub-6-figures) as time goes on.

Ageism is not just a problem in engineering, but in almost all technical fields. The problem is, that 20-something kid, you don't judge them by what they can do, you judge them by their growth potential. There is then a natural bias that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" and so we judge older candidates (say "senior") by what they can do, assuming that they are at or have hit their peak. This all flies out the window in management or executive positions, where leadership and bullsh*ting are more sought after.

Even though it isn't fair at all, it makes sense when you think about it. Its something to keep in mind when we are young, to climb the ladder as fast as possible so that we are "immune" later. It is much harder for those of us that don't like management and prefer to be engineers for our careers.

What is worth mentioning is that in Europe you don't need a six figure salary to be well-off. In the US you have all sorts of expenses that just don't correlate in most European countries. The main ones being healthcare & education: I had a month of tests resulting in keyhole surgery and this wasn't done on the national health service it was private, the bill was a fraction of what it would have been in the US. The term "Social Security" means different things in different countries.

Now he is in Germany I suspect he will be well looked after and if he chooses to retire there, instead of returning to the US, he will be well looked after. Don't be too surprised at him being happy with a five figure salary instead of his old six figures, money isn't everything.

I wonder why the nytimes would focus on a story like this--the guy should have had at least a quarter million saved up not including retirement funds, and with his severance, he could just coast into retirement.

Sure, some people hate to not work, but that still wouldn't make him a tragic figure.

Let's assume he had (to use your number) $250,000 in net worth.

How, pray tell, is he going to retire on $438,000? On top of inflation, you're doing quite well if your portfolio gets 4 to 5%. That means one can safely draw about $20,000 annually from that.

The sad truth of a contracting economy is that most people can afford to retire by the age at which society seems to expect it.

Retiring on a half a million dollars doesn't seem impossible. Presumably he is drawing down the principal as well as collecting interest. His house is likely paid off, and he has no young dependents to pay for. He will also be receiving Social Security payments for the rest of his life. He may have to make some lifestyle compromises, but it's certainly possible to live a decent retirement on that much money.

The OP said 250k in savings in addition to retirement funds. At that age, you shouldn't have a mortgage either. It seems simple two stretch 438k for a decade or so when you have no mortgage or rent. Then you hit 65 and start using retirement funds.

1) $250K is only 1,33 times his last gross salary of $188K so that would make him a dramatic undersaver at this age.

2) Assuming he owned his apartment you can go Mr. Money Mustache on $20K dividends a year. If he owned a house he could downgrade as well.

3) There are people sailing around the world on a budget of $2000 per month. Just dividends from his severance and renting out his house (assuming he owned only that) would get him there.

I can totally understand the shock of seeing reality turn out drastically different than his expectations but once you get near the ~500K net worth figure, it becomes possible to cover necessities indefinitely.

"There are people sailing around the world on a budget of $2000 per month"

Those people probably don't have reasonable health insurance.

Private health insurance with global ex-US coverage is quite affordable.

$2000 per month puts you well into the upper class in the majority of countries. Those people have good health care, why shouldn't an American who goes to those same places.

I agree. It's pretty hard to feel sorry for a person who has experienced extraordinary success until his 60s. With his severance package alone, I could live for four years with my current lifestyle.

They focused on him because he actually found a job. Most 58 year olds facing involuntary retirement do not. "Man can't find job, has $20K/yr to live on until he's dead" does not make for a very inspiring story.

What I saw, over a few decades in programming is that: Right off you start off with a split between people who love it, and people for whom it is a job. The jobs people seldom transition to loving it. On the other hand, each few years, a few loving-it people peel off to stable niches and quiet work. It's attrition. And so while I decry ageism (and that kids might think me less good than I am) ... prejudices can be somewhat odds based. Few people really keep on loving it and trying machine learning late in life. Perhaps each paradigm shift (I can use that, darn it!) leaves a few behind.

While the gap has increased during the recession, the proportion has stayed about the same. Since there would be proportionately fewer jobs, it makes sense that the gap wouldn't stay fixed. While I'm sure ageism is at play, you also have to consider that older people who have specialized are going to be looking at a smaller job pool. Even if they haven't specialized they still can't do hard labor jobs that younger people could do. Also they might have more savings, allowing them to look for more specific jobs that they actually want to do, rather than any job.

we just hired a guy in his mid 40s to do sysadmin work. apparently he had been out of work for over a year.

turns out he worked with someone we know 3 jobs ago, completely randomly (didn't find out until the interview). we snapped him up right quick as his salary requirements were relaxed because of his work hiatus. even 10k/year makes a huge difference when you're a small firm. that's $1-2k/month when you factor in payroll tax and healthcare.

would we have hired him if he didn't know that guy? i would be lying if i said i knew for sure. but we have other > 35 year olds on the team, so there's a good chance. but it certainly helped.

either way, great hire so far. certainly increases the chance of us hiring more > 40 folks in the future (all the founders are < 30)

lesson to me is always be on good terms with the poeple you work with, you never know when an old colleague will put in a good word for you in the future, and under what circumstances.

How ironic that a VP at a student loan company ends up getting in over his with a student loan.

"The only way to succeed is to make people hate you." --Josef von Sternberg

I worked at a major semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands of candidates, many of who were older than me.

I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.

The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management, wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc. These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just icing on the cake.

The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for fifteen years were usually awful.

I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers" hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out awesome.

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