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. |
I can’t wait. I want to use my WordPerfect, and Lotus 123 skills again. Lotus Notes was my jam! |
My agency contracts out all its IT work. Here are a list of the vendors we use: Large Businesses Accenture Federal Services LLC (75N98022D00024) Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. (BAH) (75N98022D00027) Customer Value Partners, Inc (CVP) (75N98022D00029) BCG Federal Corporation (75N98022D00030) Deloitte Consulting, LLP (75N98022D00031) Enterprise Resources Performance, Inc. (ERPI) (75N98022D00033) Guidehouse, Inc (75N98022D00034) ICF Incorporated, LLC (75N98022D00035) GovernmentCIO, LLC (75N98022D00037) NeteSolutions Corporation (NETE) (75N98022D00038) T and T Consulting Services, Inc. (75N98022D00040) RIVA Solutions (75N98022D00041) Publics Sapient (75N98022D00042) CALIBRE Systems, Inc (75N98023D00004) KPMG LLP (75N98023D00005) The Prospective Group (TPG) (75N98023D00010) Small Businesses Advanced Decision Vectors, LLC (75N98022D00025) BLH Technologies (75N98022D00026) Censeo Consulting Group, Inc. (75N98022D00028) Arch System, LLC (75N98022D00032) Jefferson Solutions (75N98022D00036) Sprezzatura Management Consulting, LLC (75N98022D00039) Corner Alliance, Inc. (75N98022D00043) NeevSys Inc (75N98023D00006) Sonora & Associates, LLC (75N98023D00007) Inno-Native, LLC (Joint Venture) (75N98023D00008) CIDVER Corporation (75N98023D00009) |
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 am sure one of my friend works for a grocery store maintaining their systems. You can also do tech at a bank or private credit (we have trouble hiring tech talent). Older women who are humble, easy to talk to, truly care about the business requirements over their balls are gold! |
Not true in my office,,they are mostly 14 and 15s with degrees. |
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. |
I’m guessing you are in a leadership role not IC, right, and an established tech company (big tech?) |
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. |
I switched to an industry on a consumer side that was also suited to my skillset and subject matter background. |
Not true at all. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
Drop the first ten years of work from your resume. |