On Getting Older in Tech (opens in new tab)

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad.

It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear.

That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest web trends. Your reward: you are still employable.

And why is it that most older people answering on these threads are so passionate about learning and about new technologies and the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that?

It all seems fake. Like they're trying to put on a brave face while at the same time being scared and trying to convince themselves that all this new and shiny tech that they work with is awesome.

Why not have an honest conversation instead of pretending that learning some thing or another will make everything ok in the end?

One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices for many applications. But no one knows it because it's not the shiny new thing, and even young people still can't seem to get their heads around the fact that the parens are a feature, not a bug. And that makes me grumpy sometimes.

The good part was that I was able to build a very successful career while not having to suffer nearly as much pain as many of my contemporaries. The bad part is that now it's hard to find people to collaborate with. :-(

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30

I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very much like to hire senior people as well but they're much harder to find.

I wonder how much of what he said is true vs ageism.

On the other hand, I wonder how much of a natural bias there is against older people if they have to go through the same interview process because it felt like a mental marathon to me. Although the interview only lasts a day it took a couple days for me to recover.

I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble.

63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now.

I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism.

My last job was at a bank in Richmond VA and there was clear ageism in IT when I got their. I moved to compliance from IT for two years and I was very successful and never observed ageism.

At 53 I moved to a web development manager and developer role in Higher Ed. I took a gigantic pay cut, if you factor in bonuses and options to work in Higher Ed. But I got to send my oldest to college at a selective school for free. A $200K after tax benefit.

I don't look back. My life is so much better now with a 40 hour work week and being in control 100% on how we architect our web and backend eco-system. I spend more than 40 hours because I love learning but I choose when, where and what I learn and work on after 40 hours.

I read these comments from people that are 36, 40, 40+ and shake my head. That is not old. 63 is not even old. I plan on working till I am at least 67. I love my job and I especially love the people I work with.

I find these days I spend less time coding and I end up with better applications because I think through the design before coding.

I'm going to ask around in Richmond VA and see what ageism exists in industry here and report back.

Keep learning, try as hard as you can to stay in shape and engage in critical thinking. Good luck to each of you in staying employed and staying happy.

Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least.

You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic.

Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time.

For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and C++ 17).

Pick technologies with a steep learning curves, don't try to compete with 20-year olds doing Javascript Bootcamps - go five steps deeper.

Broaden your horizon - read poetry, listen to all kinds of new music, watch experimental movies, travel around, talk to foreigners, eat weird food.

Study physics and philosophy, psychology and economy.

Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again :)

You have kids ? Great! Learn from them - everything. Try to teach them what they study at school - see if you can figure out a better explanation. Notice how much new stuff you learn about the subject, about yourself and your kid!

We're all getting old(er) every day - as we age this process seems to accelerate - and one day we will be no more.

But inside us lives the kid, the 20-year old, the 30-year old. It's still there, it can still be crazy and fun, we just need to remember to go on a date with our younger selves. All the rest will follow.

At least that's what I'm telling myself :)

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process.

In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job.

You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial, healthy, nice and culturally sensitive are necessary and useful things to keep your job after you join, but the gatekeeping itself is biased on the other side, which reduces the intake to a trickle.

48 yo here, started coding when I was 14, so that's 34 years of building things.

Here's where I'm at.

I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories.

But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kicker - it's all gone.

Software is ephemeral. One day your client does an upgrade, and then the thing that you spent years building and curating like a baby disappears. It isn't mothballed and put in the basement where visitors can walk by and see it. There's no photo of you standing by the thing that you can hang in the hallway and see every day. Your creation just completely vanishes without a trace.

All those years I've also been a musician and recording engineer. I've made a few dozen records none of which amount to anything that anyone else would care about. And all told I'm sure that I earned more money in one year of my IT work than my entire music career.

However, here is a collection of my work that I can point to and say, "I made that." It's a creation that I can reflect on years and years down the road.

I take much more satisfaction in my musical creations than from my software creations, even though I was much more famous and valued as a software architect.

Younger people are not smarter. They might learn faster new things. On the other hand, older people understand related new things much better as they already have a large context (experience). The biggest difference of my current self (44) to my younger self is that I did spend much more energy in my projects when I was younger. I created results much faster at the cost of limited consideration. Now, I can still burn for a while, but not as long as when I was younger.

Not a bad post at all and it definitely hit home for me.

I'm 43 and have been doing professional development for 20 years (actually 20 years). I moved permanently to Saigon just 1.5 months ago. I'm teaching the Pivotal software engineering process (agile / extreme) to a 100 person consultancy full of really smart ~20 year olds who didn't know or understand process at all.

I keep up on all the latest tech and I have a youthful mind and body (most people think I'm in my 30's). I'm the oldest guy in the company and the only American here. This has quickly lead to a lot of personal mentoring on many levels, not just software, but life in general. The culture in Vietnam is strong and my team wants to learn from me. It is very exciting and new for all of us. It has been an amazing experience so far and I look forward to the future.

The best additional advice? Just be nice. It is so simple. The culture here is to never raise your voice or get mad in public, so I've taken it to the other extreme and I just smile and laugh a lot. Even when the servers are melting down. Viet are shy and have poor personal communication skills. By being friendly and nice, they have learned to trust me and that has opened up them up a lot. It has infected my entire team and improved moral almost over night.

Being older has a lot of advantages. I'm loving my 40's way more than my 20's. Cheers! =)

Article mentions "RPG" many times: "RPG back-end", "RPG developer". For those who wonder what it it (like me), it is not a "Role Playing Game", it is IBM RPG language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age.

That said, the OP is correct. You're only as good as your last two years and even that's pushing it. If the tech changes, you have to adapt with it.

I'm 53 as of yesterday (the 8th). I started with PDP-11's in the 80's, then VAX's, then PC's, BASIC at first, then C, then Visual Basic, then ASP, then C#/ASP.NET, and now I'm deep into AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, Redshift), NodeJS, AngularJS 1.x/2, ReactJS, and I'm still learning new technology all the time.

A lot of developers will transition to management and it's on my mind, but I'm also still drawn to solving problems at a code level. And there's always new toys to play with like Angular and React. Now we have .NET Core and all of its interesting avenues.

If you actually care about being a good developer, you will continue to work.

As long as there are jobs. Nothing will help you if the job market contracts. Then I do believe hiring becomes age-oriented with us older dev's labeled "over-qualified".

It makes sense to plug https://oldgeekjobs.com

I've taken a small break from working on it, so the traffic has died down some, but feel free to post your tech jobs for free for the time being.

Elon Musk is 45. Does that make him old? Doesn't seem to slow him down.

edit: just saying limits seem artificial, that's all

There's a reason why ageism exists in the industry and it isn't because of some undeserved stereotype about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks.

1) Most business-critical projects have long lifetimes. There's a reason why banks are still running COBOL and mainframes, and why Java's continued promise of backward compatibility with every new release is so valuable to companies.

2) Maintaining legacy systems is a bitch. Nobody likes maintaining legacy systems.

3) Therefore no employer wants to hire somebody who writes code which almost immediately turns into legacy code, either because it's not tested, or not written using modern language features designed to make the language safer, etc.

4) Learning to write code in a modern fashion requires continued education.

5) Employers will not budget or pay for this continued education in a no-compete-clauses-are-illegal environment where smart employees will take the training and run to another employer willing to pay for the benefit of another employer which already put in the legwork of investing in that employee.

6) Employees therefore need to spend significant time educating themselves on their own time. This is great for the minority who are computer geeks who treat it as a hobby and it's terrible for everyone else.

7) Most people will not spend personal time educating themselves, because they prefer to invest that time in friends and family. This is all the more true, not less true, after one's children are grown.

8) Therefore they slowly become unemployable as their skill set turns obsolete.

9) Therefore employers have a hard time finding older people who do have that combination of a modern skill set and decades of general industry experience. And it's for the same reason it was difficult to hire any programmers at all in the 90's, because the competent labor pool (then in general and now in the older age group) is basically limited to computer geeks.

10) Continued interviews of older people who did not bother to keep their skill set modern and honed creates a stereotype that old people aren't "smart".

It's not a problem that some Chief Diversity Officer at some Big Four company can solve, because they're either going to literally fight human nature (people desiring quality time with their families) or they're going to adapt an affirmative action policy that'll only make the problem worse, as prefer-false-negative hiring policies set up to protect codebases from incompetence get overturned for what's essentially a political reason, breeding resentment.

Ageism is real in the Vally but it can cut both ways. In my current company we did a SWOT analysis and one of our advantages was "many old farts, and many former colleagues friends".

Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily put in a 50+ hour week when necessary (which it often is, but not all the time, in a startup) and get more done in 40 hours than the squirts do in 60+.

You need a mix of ages and backgrounds. A bias to youth is as bad as a bias towards time-in-grade, or any other such bias.

I think it’s more about not appreciating experience enough as opposed to discriminating against age. I’m 31 with 13 years professional experience. I’ve worked as an employee, contractor and as a single person start-up. Last year I interviewed for ~10 jobs in SV and I was rejected for all of them. None of the jobs valued my experience enough to consider my asking salary to be worth it. I make ~$300K USD contracting and was willing to take a pay cut to ~$240K to work at a big company and for access to big problems. I found out, via a friend, that one of the jobs I missed out on was due to my asking salary. They ended up hiring a guy with much less experience for ~$120K for the position. A year later and the project failed due to lack of experience costing many millions of dollars. I wanted them to succeed and I know that I could have done it but I’m not going back to $120K - at $300K customers only let you work on important stuff, no busy work. This story gets repeated over and over. There is a culture problem that doesn’t value experience. It’s not my problem because I'll go to where my experienced is most valued; it’s SVs problem because it results in failed projects and wasted money.

I'll probably be ~36 by the time I complete a PhD in CS. Should I be OK in terms of finding jobs at hip companies upon graduation (big 4, etc)? My areas of interest is in ML, algorithms but I'm completely OK with normal software development positions.

Reason I'm older is I decided I had a passion for it in my late 20s / wanted to do research, but had to go back to school to take classes before enrolling into a PhD. Hope my age + PhD wouldn't hinder me for software development jobs?

I'm 39, ageism is real, but I'm gonna tell you to quit whining grow a pair, and what the hell is wrong with you if you cannot sell your strengths, wisdom and experience?

(BTW: just so it's clear I apply this same rule to everyone - this is the same advice I would give to any discriminated group, whether women in tech, people of color, Jewish or Asian or whatever group that find themselves on the victim side of discrimination)

Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. Be razer clear what your value is.

Almost every one will have some or other circumstance where some trait of his/her counts against himself, that is life, but these are merely speedbumps on the way, not show stoppers.

If you can't overcome bias at one specific company or in one specific country, move or do whatever YOU can do to solve it. Crying aint gonna fix it.

Young software developers scope out the projects (time required to develop a project) very differently from older engineers. Seems like the industry has forgotten the role of the QA engineer! With experience, you know that you need time for architecture, risk planning and putting things in production. I see younger engineers quoting 1-2 months to just about every project; just earmarking enough time need to put together some frameworks and write a basic code. Cloud technologies and new frameworks definitely do make building projects easier. But scaling up a product is still not very easy and casual usage of several new frameworks, comes back to bite very often.

I just hope people stop being so hurried about seeing the first cut of their products. That itself would fix some issues around this topic.

Get a job in an industry that uses tech, but isn't itself pure tech (healthcare IT for example). Then your years of domain experience matter.

Related to fitness. I never went to the gym. However I was working on fitness related site for some years and as a lead there, I wanted to be reflection of this site I cared much about. So I did what I like, walk and running up the stairs.

Whenever there are stairs, I would run up them. Now, again I am not super fit, but I don't lose breath, everyone else kind of does. This gives me great pleasure.

I am older developer, it is getting hard, I will not lie. But, I am on top of latest technologies, enjoy my work, I am pain in the but.

Oh cool, he made a webshop with an RPG backend. I last did that about 15 years ago, it looked just as awful, and just like him, I was so proud of my achievement at the time, that I couldn't see what an abomination it really was. It's a pity, that customer deserved better.

I totally believe age discrimination is real, and the Corgibytes author hits the nail on the head with:

> Only as Good as Your Last Two Years of Accomplishments

> Kent Beck has suggested that, with consistent use of pair programming, the capabilities of programmers don’t differ much after two years of experience.

Experience in our field rots away at an amazing rate. I don't think it's as short as 2 years, but if you're still regularly using techniques you mastered 10+ years ago, you're probably falling behind. I don't think lawyers, doctors or stock brokers have this problem.

> I’m only as good as what I’ve accomplished in the last two years

This implies no more salary increases after two years?

It just struck me that Zuckerberg is starting to get too old for himself.

An interesting thing happened to me in college. As I progressed through it, I found I learned more complex stuff with less effort. A big part of it was I was able to see what was important to learn and not waste time on irrelevant things.

As I get older in tech, I have a similar experience. Of course, one can go too far and think everything new is irrelevant :-)

"I have taken big cuts in salary three or four times in my career. I’m talking 10-20 thousand dollars a year." - HOW can you do that? How does one justify that kind of long-term damage to ever being in a position that you don't have to work?

I understand the idea of it; to move into a technology or business with more room for growth, but if you don't have the time in your career to benefit from that growth, how can you do it?

If you're in your late 40's, early 50's, with a mortgage and/or children, or that point where you can choose not to have to work anymore is dangerously close. One badly-timed layoff, one forced pay cut and you're stuck.

Especially if you're in that age range; the last generation that ever had some hope for long-term employment with an employer, the generation that saw pension plans converted to 401Ks and didn't understand just how much you personally needed to take over funding your retirement yourself. You're dangerously close to having one badly timed layoff or large pay cut snatch the choice of not having to work away from you.

I'm always curious whether Zuckerberg stands behind that quote or if he looks back on it today as part of a youthful hubris he regrets today. I know if I look back on my early 20s I remember a lot of similar arrogance that I hope I've shed at least some of today.

I worked at IBM Research where one of the top experts in malware research was a 60 y/o guy wearing a big copper bell hanging on the rope and he was diving into assembly level code like a water.

Smart companies want smart solutions to tough problems.

Assuming that solution is coming from certain audience, like age/race/gender based is a recipe to failure.

Smart companies are after smart people. Who cares about anything else.

about the value of experience, I had it explained to me like this:

  If you see a toddler running after a ball that rolls under a coffee table, bending over to go under the table and 
  to pick up the ball... 
  You know what's going to happen next. That's experience.
  There are just different balls and coffee tables.

I'm a 42 year old technologist who just got laid off last week, and very much dread age discrimination. Although I'm told that I look about 8 or 10 years younger than I look, it still scares me. And, funny enough I'm about as energetic - or very close to it - as I was when I was 22. Beyond all the great notes that the blog post's author wrote, I think the parts about "exude energy...it’s crucial to be spirited." really hit home with me. Especially now with my current situation, i appreciate this blog post!

"You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? They take them out and shoot them." - Primer (2004)

One of the biggest killers of sedentary professions is heart disease, which is the number one killer in the US. People who work at Microsoft have told me they give free soda, sugared "juices" with artificial flavors, coffees and teas for free to their employees. These all are sources of heart disease, but the young engineers drink it up like a lost caravan in the desert. It's likely not that different in any of the other areas as well.

The cost for ailments such as heart disease is known to be one of the most expensive in the US. It requires extensive testing, support, medications and visits to the doctors and hospitals. Considering the extremely high health care costs the US enforces, this places a huge dent on insurance premiums companies pay as well as accommodation, etc.

These companies want them out before they have to pay more premiums on health-care and other factors related to health, age, seniority, etc...

Umh... http://www.kettlerusa.com/?fullSite=&cartId=&division=kettle...

The design. The url. Clicked "add to card" - default JS alert popup. Then some HTML pop up showed up saying something about my IP being banned because of BOTNET? What? Now refreshing the page I get a timeout.

This is literally the worst eshop I've seen in the past few years. I wouldn't hire a man who made this atrocity and sure as hell wouldn't like working with him.

Yes! The most important thing I learned in academia is to never stop learning and to always push yourself to never get stale. Learning doesn't stop at high school, college or grad school.

Existence proof. Can avoid ageism. But likely only via competence, creativity, and rep.

I've been lucky, I guess.I would add to continuous learning: continuous invention. New stuff in the world, not just new to you. In my case, almost entirely unplanned drunkard's walk of a career that I don't recommend anyone emulates, but it sure has been a wild ride.

I'm 69 last month. Started 50 years ago inside discrete component technology mainframes. Done hardware logic design, firewire and Medialink FPGA, datacomms Hard Real Time embedded firmware, synchronous and asynchronous comms protocol design, real time networking design in the Music world (before anybody thought it possible, we showed em!:), created cool 4G visual programming languages, lately Audio DSP inside gaming consoles.

Moral: Keep inventing, keeps you young, moreso than just leaning new stuff you won't be using until it is obsolete. A wide T LI profile doesn't hurt either. But that is not an after-thought, it's a side effect of your lifetime of energy and obsessions.

Vaguely thinking of retiring when I'm 72 or so. Want to make more music, DSP takes too much time.

54 yo here. Although I have a bachelor's in EE, I have been developing software since the beginning of my career. I am not necessarily nostalgic but I sometimes ponder about the real time assembly I wrote for a Telex switch, or the CHILL code I wrote for a telephony switch. All of it pretty much gone, not being produced anymore. Or the Windows 2 GUI written in C, the multi tier apps in VB6 and Powerbuilder. They are gone too.

However having participated in these projects give me a lot of perspective, and I notice that nowadays I tend to write less and be more thoughtful. I see others here with similar experiences.

Now as for getting old, there is one thing I recommend: get old but never allow yourself to look decrepit. Be always clean, well dressed. Don't complain about your back hurting, or show off the medicines you take. No one likes to be around sickness or weakness, so pretend to be healthy and strong (or try to be, even better). I aim for this reaction - "that guy looks good for his age". This usually helps with ageism, at least in my experience.

FWIW, I'm still on the earlier side of my career (though certainly not just starting out) and the direction of my learning has been away from fads and towards older, more established technologies. Erlang, Unix, etc. have all been around for many years, and while they do receive active development are still pretty well established and based off of sound engineering principles.

I also try and get beyond the hype. REST/HATEOS is cool? What about the things it replaced? What are the edge cases? What was the original design intent?

I also read from/talk with older engineers (many of whom I have the privilege to work with) to understand what things were like during previous fads.

Ultimately, the problem is about staying marketable while giving fair due to our life outside of work (I prefer the term "unpaid responsibilities" to "leisure time"). I don't claim to have solved this problem, and I still have concerns about what the future holds, but my instinct is that staying on top of fads is a trap that I want to avoid.

Im closing in on 54. Having an absolute blast in tech now because i bring 4 decades of coding, life, and a number of different jobs to what i do today. And I devote every morning first thing to reading and learning something new - python, azure databases, IPC in C#, C and SBCs, ZigBee. There is so much out there at a price point that makes learning painless and fun.

In life i stay healthy as a vegetarian and practice yoga. Look after the body and the mind will largely follow suit but feed the mind with challenges daily and you will notice that you get better over time at a rate the javascript kiddies cant comprehend.

Maybe this ageism is jealousy from the kiddies because you think leagues ahead of them, and also jealousy from old managers who cant do anything productive now that their body of knowledge is no longer useful? Food for thought, for someone. I wont be wasting any time to think about it.

Well, if the author is almost 60, it probably won't matter which career he's in, he would likely suffer from some sort of ageism. It doesn't matter if you're a programmer, or in finance, or working at Costco, if you're getting close to 60, most people will be skeptical as to whether you can really work as well as a 25 year old.

Yes,there is ageism but there is also some remnant of meritocracy in IT development and operations (though both the evolution of devops and enterprise agile + ci/cd tool culture will eventually kill that imo).

The only way to remain in the IT game at the age of 45+ is to learn constantly and use your aggregate experience to determine what is good and bad and necessary. When most of the 20+ year IT veterans are in set piece environments they enabled or abetted...technological advent and invention is the enemy.

All the musings on how great a person you really are contra|outside tech are band-aids on reality. If you make your living in technology: be better than the other guy or be useful to them. That's all there is. Otherwise your days are numbered.

We can ramble on about salad days and personal achievement but the younger guys snicker and say 'listen to this fossil' and do their thing. As you would have in their shoes.

As someone who transitioned to tech from finance, I can tell you that this trend (preferring young workers to old) is not limited to tech. The fact is companies in general are going to prefer younger people for labor. Younger people are cheaper, tend to have fewer obligations outside of work, and are willing to put up with more on the job.

As someone getting older and more experienced, you can take this one of two ways. (i) You can try to "learn new tech" and "stay up to date" in an effort to compete with these younger workers or (ii) you can actually listen to the market. And what is the market telling you? Yes, younger workers are more valuable for the aforementioned reasons. But it's also telling you that by the time you are 40 or 50, you should be implementing your own ideas, not someone else's.

Getting older in tech, most of the stuff I learned is obsolete: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/184668/readers_throw...

I'm a legacy software, retrocomputing expert now I guess?

Most of the old commercial software has released free and open source versions of itself or someone wrote a FOSS clone or whatever to do the same things.

I am 48 years old now, getting close to 50 in two years, and can apply for AARP and get better health insurance through them.

I ended up on disability, but been trying to learn new things and keep up with trends and patterns in the industry.

> between 2008 and 2010, I was training Java developers at Circuit City on Groovy and Grails. These folk were mostly late 20s and early 30s, and they were just fine sticking with good-old, write-everything-yourself, don’t-bother-with-frameworks, Java.

You're assuming Groovy and Grails are better to code in than Java and something like Spring. Grails began as a thin wrapper around Spring. Its business purpose was to chisel market share away from vanilla Spring so its backing company (G2One) would get bought by SpringSource, which eventually happened in late 2008.

While I believe their ageism in tech. So what. I'm 56, I've been programming professionally for 30+ years. Code is still code. Theirs not much new under the sun at a core level.

Consider this, many thousands of lives depend on my ability to write good, maintainable code everyday. I do Alarms, Telematics and 911 Systems.

So ageism. ya, it exists. But for every 50 year old coder, theirs 150 under 30 in the business. Its just the way it is. But I know, if I was in the hiring end of the game, I'd drop my dime on the old fart whose got a ton of REAL WORLD experience over some freshly minted grad every day of the week.

Out of the software devevelopers I know, only a few percent are 40+, so my sample set isn't very reliable. But from what I've seen, the average (or at least median) skill set was better for younger people, where the best ones I've met are in their 30s.

My assumption is that there has been a point where software/CS started booming and people started getting degrees in that field. Among the 40+ devs I know there's a higher percentage of carreer changers, and with a few exceptions those have been generally less skilled.

It's good advice to keep up to date and in shape, and always have, but unfortunately even that is often not sufficient.

Lately potential employers have been expressing surprise that I never went into management. I enjoy developing so was never interested---until I encountered a few truly incompetent bosses in the last few years and rethought my position. So I've read all the classics, such as MMM, Peopleware, etc... but found it is too late to be hired as a manager when you've never managed anyone.

One of the strongest team members at my workplace, super smart, asks more questions than anyone else, thinks of the stuff the younger guys don't, basically would always want him on my team as he gets stuff done, is an older guy. I think he's prob in his mid 50s. (to be clear, I don't actually think mid 50s is old, but society sometimes suggests it is)

32yr old here. This is interesting to me, coming from times of 28kbps internet where the dude with a huge beard was a tech god.

Reading this and reading the posts, I'm aware of what occurs to be a trade off in young/age, in that young can be cutting edge while old tends to have wisdom/smarter about approach/worldlyness.

Seems shortsighted to think that young is better.

It's ok to get older in the tech industry as a whole just not in spaces like are Silly Valley and or places that are trying to be such and draw that crowd.

The best place in tech for older is a govt. job where age skewers older and you may even be a minority amongst your fellow laid back/no drama, hard working Indian co-workers. The pay is more then good too!

I read a study in the 90's comparing more experienced and less experiences multimedia programmers given identical tasks. In short, it concluded that the more experienced ones took longer to do the tasks, but did them to a higher level of quality.

That has always rung true to me, and I see that happening today.

I think the industry you choose matters. I have done work in the Medical and Transportation industries and the devs there seem to be older. I tend to gravitate towards development where the code simply has to work correctly. This means proven technologies are used as opposed to the new and shiny.

I get inspired by the japanese Shokunin work ethics, it is well described on the Jiro Dreams of Sushi movie, a explanation can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78xvcnmIMw

"Uncle, What do you think."

It's tech.this age thing.

Forced out of tech by invention/adoption of cell phone age is worshiped in my jobs today. Like Indians calling seniors "uncle" to show respect.

Age is my shield, my platform, my integrity and my perceived knowledge.

It's tech

I've found out how to sidestep agism - work for yourself. Build it in whatever 'old' language you want, bring value, and profit.

Now I get to sit on the porch and yell at the youngin's "Get off my lawn!"

> After years of scoffing at talk of prejudice in the information technology field...

It seems kind of ridiculous that white men won't believe in hiring prejudice/discrimination until it directly affects them.

This cuts both ways. As a young founder and manager, I must be extremely conscious of hiding my age. Without knowing the number, my team is fine. Once they know all hell breaks loose, at least for a while.

Fantastic article. I am lucky enough to work with Don and he is amazing. Probably one of the most simultaneously brave and curious people I've ever met.

Life is ageist.

Great post; You should focus more on Consulting jobs;

My advice to all is to keep an eye on the ball and understand where you are and where you expect to be every five years and have a plan. If you plan on being just an expert or individual contributor when you are 40 or 50, then expect to have to compete with those in their 20s. Not too easy when a 25 year old has fewer responsibilities at home (like teen-aged children) and can spend their spare time learning the latest fringe technology to make it more mainstream. Also not too easy to fit in culturally unless you have the developmental maturity of a 25 year old. (See my note about The Stakes at the bottom.) Adults with no responsibilities can drop acid and go to Burning Man without consequences. Responsible adults cannot without the risks they take impacting others. (in response to a poster's comment) That's what separates the men from the boys, to coin a phrase. No offense to ladies or others.

What I am not hearing in all of these discussions is talk of developing leadership fundamentals. They apply not just to one's job/career but to the individual and all aspects of their life.

There's 5 levels of leadership:

I. Individual Contributor Self-leadership. Responsible for producing work and getting along with others.

II. Expert/Manager Expert Best at what they do. Work on more complex projects. Display a special talent. Design a plan for new products. Further develop their craft. Innovate on projects. Demonstrate readiness to tackle more challenges

Manager Managers are tactical, focus on the short term. Lead individual contributors and experts. Develop staff. Focus is on improving upon weaknesses necessary to succeed at being more than an individual contributor or expert. Navigate organizational structures. Maximize talent of team. Think strategically about how team contributes to organization goals.

III. Leader of Leaders Leaders are strategic, focus on the long term. Focus shifts to training level IIs on their managing weaknesses. Training and developing (mentoring) experts and managers. Role is critical to the success of an organization. Poor managers have a huge and damaging impact because they leave high turnover and disengagement as well as low morale and productivity in their wake. Refined communication skills up and down the organization, acting as a reliable conduit for information to flow up and down. Develop business acumen. Develop organizational strategy. Develop new leadership opportunities.

IV. Leader of Functions/Divisions Maximize the contributions of all groups within the function/division. Strategize the development of the function for the future of the whole organization. Builds a competitive strategy. Ensures long term growth. Mentor and engage direct reports. Build key relationships outside organization. Deepen their intimate knowledge of other functions. Attune to industry and market shaping factors (sector acumen).

V. Leader of Organization Manages all functional leaders. Sets the vision and strategy. Ensures future success. CEO Build a team of differing strengths. Empower functional/division leaders. Create a motivating culture. Share the vision of the future. Position to be at front of trends.

As you move up 3 things change: - Scope of your view - The Stakes/impact of your decisions - Proportion of management and leadership

What skills do you need to maximize your potential? What skills do you need to develop for the next level?

Leveling up is growing up. If you don't like or want to be a manager or leader, figure out why not, starting with understanding your emotions and managing your stress and anxiety. This is usually what stifles one's development.