Aging out of tech

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Someone with a degree in CS primarily should be looking for positions in the 1550 series, not in 2210.

At many places, not all, the 2210 is used only for people without an actual CS or engineering degree - someone such as a HS grad with some set of Microsoft or Cisco certifications and maybe a 2-yr IT degree from NoVA.

Not true in my office,,they are mostly 14 and 15s with degrees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I don’t make a FAANG salary, but my stable 120-160K salary while living in a low cost area allowed me to pay for private school, live in a nice house and do occasional expensive vacations.

I also work remotely and have a very comfortable life. So I’m very content.

NP. If you are a decent writer (and you seem to be) and have an undergraduate STEM degree, you can study for and take the patent bar, and work for a law firm as a patent agent. There is a lot of demand for technically astute patent agents. There are also law firms that hire technical specialists. Many firms have offices in low cost areas because they can recruit people like you there.

Work-life balance may not be good initially while you are ramping up. But you can carry it until your 70s if you want, if you are good at it. And it can be fun work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do 50 year old men also have this problem or is it just women? In my line of work a 50 year old gets more respect than a 20 something!

And what is that? Lawyer, Big 4 Partner, Doctor, Professor?

In tech older knowledge is useless. Imagine me telling kids at work I did Y2K work in 1998 or even better we hired ex college football players to work in tech in early 1980s as the data center equipment was so heavy. They laugh

I'm in tech and 50 year olds, both men and women, get much more respect than 20 year olds.
Experience and corporate knowledge is not "useless", it is extremely valuable.
As with any job, learning new skills and evolving is key.

I’m guessing you are in a leadership role not IC, right, and an established tech company (big tech?)

[Anonymous]

I’m 56 and work in government contracting. I’m constantly learning new technologies (current project is Angular and Java on OpenShift/AWS, none of which I knew 5 years ago).

I was hired as an IC developer at 54 after being laid off from my previous long tenured job, became a team lead within a couple of months, an architect within a year, and I’m now a lead architect/manager. I haven’t experienced ageism, but it’s crucial to spend a huge amount of time learning new tech on your own time. When I started interviewing, I earned Agile, Azure and AWS certs, did a ton of LeetCode problems to pass dumb tech interview tests, and immersed myself in Go4 and other theoretical reading.

Government contractors are always hiring and have huge problems finding developers with any skill at all. I interview developers every week, and I’m appalled at the clowns we get from recruiters - people who claim to be Java experts who don’t know what an abstract class is, people who claim to be SQL DBAs who have never heard of normalization, people in tech in 2024 who don’t know anything about any public cloud platform or anything about containers.

If you put in the effort to learn, you can definitely get hired.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good luck! I left tech at 46 out of fear for what is ahead (but not in dev). Hope others have more specific advice but meanwhile - and unfortunately - I would make sure to keep hair colored and stay current-ish on trends etc to ensure you are still a “cultural fit”

where did you go?

I switched to an industry on a consumer side that was also suited to my skillset and subject matter background.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Someone with a degree in CS primarily should be looking for positions in the 1550 series, not in 2210.

At many places, not all, the 2210 is used only for people without an actual CS or engineering degree - someone such as a HS grad with some set of Microsoft or Cisco certifications and maybe a 2-yr IT degree from NoVA.

Not true at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m 56 and work in government contracting. I’m constantly learning new technologies (current project is Angular and Java on OpenShift/AWS, none of which I knew 5 years ago).

I was hired as an IC developer at 54 after being laid off from my previous long tenured job, became a team lead within a couple of months, an architect within a year, and I’m now a lead architect/manager. I haven’t experienced ageism, but it’s crucial to spend a huge amount of time learning new tech on your own time. When I started interviewing, I earned Agile, Azure and AWS certs, did a ton of LeetCode problems to pass dumb tech interview tests, and immersed myself in Go4 and other theoretical reading.

Government contractors are always hiring and have huge problems finding developers with any skill at all. I interview developers every week, and I’m appalled at the clowns we get from recruiters - people who claim to be Java experts who don’t know what an abstract class is, people who claim to be SQL DBAs who have never heard of normalization, people in tech in 2024 who don’t know anything about any public cloud platform or anything about containers.

If you put in the effort to learn, you can definitely get hired.

Government contracting doesn’t have ageism because when you bid on a contract part of the specifications that they’re measured against is experience of the staff, i.e. staff with more years of experience are valued more

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good luck! I left tech at 46 out of fear for what is ahead (but not in dev). Hope others have more specific advice but meanwhile - and unfortunately - I would make sure to keep hair colored and stay current-ish on trends etc to ensure you are still a “cultural fit”

where did you go?

I switched to an industry on a consumer side that was also suited to my skillset and subject matter background.

If PP was not a developer, then being in tech wasn’t really a requirement anyways, they were just trying to milk the money while they could. They were just some other business function in every other industry, so much easier to pivot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do 50 year old men also have this problem or is it just women? In my line of work a 50 year old gets more respect than a 20 something!

And what is that? Lawyer, Big 4 Partner, Doctor, Professor?

In tech older knowledge is useless. Imagine me telling kids at work I did Y2K work in 1998 or even better we hired ex college football players to work in tech in early 1980s as the data center equipment was so heavy. They laugh

Perhaps if you're not updating your knowledge over time and want to keep making the same old widgets. But a surprising amount of old tech is incredibly useful to know. IMO being a great tech generalist requires many more years of learning, and even if you're not working infrastructure, a lot of old Linux/unix stuff is still applicable today.

Or the accumulation of abstractions and how that shapes your problem solving over time. I'm in my 50's, and probably not as hip to the latest in...JavaScript package bundlers. But I can problem solve complex problems much faster than my younger coworkers.

[Anonymous]

Drop the first ten years of work from your resume.

[Anonymous]

Why is tech/IT the only industry people age out of? Do changes occur so fast it’s hard to keep up?

[Anonymous]

I think you need to work on your management skills. In that arena, your age will be somewhat of an advantage, because you will be seen as more authoritative and experienced just by virtue of being older. I've seen this in my company, we have a lot of web developers and the ones who are older managing the younger ones just seem to have more experience and wisdom.

The reality is that you having been around for a long time should have given you some perspective and insight that's valuable. If you haven't gained any insight or wisdom into trends or patterns or management, or your particular industry, then yeah, you do have zero competitive advantage over the young ones. But you have probably picked up things that you aren't even realizing, even simple things like interpersonal skills, that count for a lot.

There are a lot of young smart and savvy web devs and tech staff that are simply arrogant, or haven't learned how to work well with others, or can't write at all, or don't know how to communicate with clients. These people are a dime a dozen

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do 50 year old men also have this problem or is it just women? In my line of work a 50 year old gets more respect than a 20 something!

And what is that? Lawyer, Big 4 Partner, Doctor, Professor?

In tech older knowledge is useless. Imagine me telling kids at work I did Y2K work in 1998 or even better we hired ex college football players to work in tech in early 1980s as the data center equipment was so heavy. They laugh

Yes, doctor/ professor.

Tech is all about youth. I would look into federal, state or local government that might want your skill set and may skew older.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is tech/IT the only industry people age out of? Do changes occur so fast it’s hard to keep up?

Happens in a lot of business functions, like marketing etc.

Mostly it’s the because you don’t need an advanced degree or certification (bar exam, CPA, MBA) that limits the number of entries of younger professionals.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This happened to my husband - after a 25 year career he hit a wall, multiple lay offs and restructures and dry spells after never worrying his entire career. It went from people begging him to work for them to struggling to stay relevant almost over night.

He pivoted hard, we bought a small business that aligns to his recreational passions. It is a risk but we don't see a future for him in tech and figure he can take his energy and try to build something on his own.

what kind of small business, how much did you buy for and does it make a living wage?
Considering a similar route...