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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Both of us were pushed out, 51 and 54. Techies. Had a 10 and 12 year old. Outsourced to India in one case and new younger hire in another. Took DH a year to find something at 30% lower salary and I haven’t found anything yet. [/quote]

Our story almost exactly. His is 45% less salary. I am jobless. 50, 48.[/quote]

That's disgusting. Now 48 is too old?[/quote]

By 35 you start being a bit long in the tooth in tech unfortunately.[/quote]

Wow! So is that not a good field to get into? Or can you use the skills elsewhere? [/quote]

So should my DS who is majoring in Comp Sci at UMD look into another field?[/quote]

FFS.  No.  Most of these people don't know what they're talking about.

If you let yourself stagnate in tech, your market value will diminish over time.  It's a dynamic field and you need to stay on top of things and/or move into management.  But, no, do not encourage your son to leave one of the most lucrative fields because of a bunch of anonymous online posts. [/quote]

My father writes compilers for *ancient* languages on embedded system (think Fortran and Cobol, C on a good day). We can't get him to retire, but demand never really went away. He seems to still be raking in cash. (think 500-1M/compensation per year at 65; not including any equity). Apparently what happens is some firm tries to 'upgrade' (since some consultant told them to) and then realizes at the last possible minute that their old system simply better, and just needed a few tweaks. So they pay my dad and his firm a fortune to save the day. 
[/quote]

This is a great anecdote, but hardly something to build a career on.  How do you know that you're niche will persist and need legacy support.  Maybe you pick the most popular CRM software platform to support; well because its so popular, Accenture sets up a whole shop to port those systems to the latest whiz bang, and invest in it enough to make it work because there are so many opportunities.  Or you pick a smaller player, but over the years everyone you support transitions to the larger players.  Not to mention mainframes were built to last, unlike most anything from recent years.[/quote]

Also, the scarcity of tech talent that existed in the 70s and 80s no longer exists.  For any technology, there are armies of people well versed in it (more or less).  So whereas your dad may be one of a few people who can do what he does today, techies of today can't rely on being the one, indispensable person who can fix a system 30-40 years down the line.[/quote]

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