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Career planningThe age of least resistance
On Sunday, there was a news program about how tough it is to find work after 40s. It was full of the usual stuff about employers only looking for young people who can work 30 hours days*, and freezing out anyone too old for their taste, etc.
This is a real problem in many cases, and one that I find abhorrent. Not the least because I plan to have a long career in my chosen field, and I really don’t like the idea of having a certain age after which I should be shuffled off to do data entry tasks, if that. Especially since that age seems not too far at all. Currently, the oldest person we have in a development role is over fifty, although most of our team is late twenties to mid thirties.
So we reached out to one of them, asking to get a CV so we can look at that. And it took me very little time to realize why this person had a hard time finding a job. In particular, while the news program was about people who are unable to find a job, this particular person actually had a job. It just wasn’t a job that he was happy with. As far as I understand, he was paid a lot less than what he was used to, comparable to someone just starting out, rather than someone with close to two decades of experience.
Looking at the CV, it was obvious why that was. This particular person job history included a 15 years stretch in a large municipality. During which he worked mostly on VB6 programs. It has only been in the last couple of years that he started working in .NET.
Now, Microsoft released VB6 in 1998. And announced that it is moving to VB.Net in early 2000, with the .NET framework being released on 2002. By 2005, VB6 was no longer supported, and by 2008 even extended support run out. So we are talking about 7 – 8 years in which the main tool at their disposal was quite clearly a dead end.
While I’ve fond memories of VB6, and I’m pretty sure that there is still a lot of software using it. It is not surprising that demand for people with VB6 expertise has already peaked and is currently in a decline that I don’t really see changing. Note that this isn’t really surprising, and you would have to willfully ignore reality to believe that there is a strong future in VB6 in the past decade.
So we have a person with expertise in obsolete tech, trying to find a job in the market with effectively 1-2 years of experience using C#. It isn’t surprising that he got what is effectively a starter position, even given his age. It isn’t that his age affected the offered position, it is that it didn’t.
This lead back to the advice I gave previously on the matter of career planning. Saying “I got a nice job” and resting on the laurels is a good way to end up in a marginalized position down the road.
Keeping your skills up to date (ideally as part of your job, but outside of it is if isn’t possible) is crucial, otherwise you are the guy with one year of actual experience, repeated many times over.
* Not a typo, it is intentionally stupid.
More posts in "Career planning" series:
- (24 Jul 2015) The immortal choices aren't
- (22 Jul 2015) The age of least resistance
- (27 Oct 2014) Mine
- (23 Oct 2014) Disaster recovery
- (22 Oct 2014) What is your path?
- (20 Oct 2014) Where do old devs go to?
Comments
Your conclusion seems to be right, but it's rather a part of the problem than a solution. I mean, is there any other profession where the knowledge becomes obsolete so quickly? Learning tools and frameworks is a waste of time if you know they'll be forgotten in 5 years and they don't contribute to your professional worth - you'll always be a beginner trying to catch up, more desperately with every year. I can't imagine same situation in construction industry or medicine.
Rafal, Off the top of my head:
And there is a huge difference between being a beginner catching up to everything, and being someone who actually knows what they are doing and only needing to know the difference, not from scratch
What I find onerous about the recruiting process... which is quite different from the VB6 to C# migration. It's the companies looking for an expert on one specific technology.
Let's say as a company you're looking for someone to work on an app that uses RavenDB. You have a resume from someone who has spent the past 3 years working on an app that uses MongoDB. Are you going to interview her? Most HR/recruiters/hiring managers would turn her away, even though the experience you need from a developer is not so much the specific technology, but the thinking involved in the paradigm shift moving from relational to document.
It's like trying to hire a trim carpenter with experience with the Bostitch 15 gauge angled nailer, and turning away anyone who has only used Senco.
This could be an explanation for why there are so few old programmers. Maybe programmers routinely mess up their careers by becoming obsolete.
Becoming obsolete is the default thing. If you don't brush up your skills for 5-10 years you are basically obsolete.
I've seen this with many people I've worked with. They allow themselves to be left behind. This seems to be a systematic mistake.
I don't know if this is the same in your locality, but in the US, software development has had a steady ~12% growth year over year for quite a while. That has interesting ramifications if you dig into it. For one, that means your programmer population doubles every five years or so. Which means that at any given time, half of working developers have less than five years of experience. As that pace continues, there's a very natural reason you don't find a lot of older programmers and it isn't anything so sinister as discrimination. After ten years developing, only a quarter of developers are at your level of experience. After 20, that'd be around 6%. I think it's likely most of those are doing fine because, as you point out, it isn't hard to detect your skillset becoming obsolete. I know I've taken steps to ensure I remain relevant even after 20 years in the field. I'm making more now than ever before and I don't see that changing because my skills are in demand. My depth of experience is just icing on the employment cake.
And I wish I could take credit for any of the above observed facts. Truth is, I heard it from the fine folks at dotnetrocks... :)
Mark, you say "Maybe programmers routinely mess up their careers by becoming obsolete" but how do you avoid that? Study may not be the answer.
I was laid off in August 2013 and struggled to find work. Maybe it's different in the US but Australian recruiters don't look at what you are able to do - they only look at what you have a track record of several years' experience in. So mastering a technology with self-study is insufficient proof - the road to continued employment appears to be only work within large enterprises that let people move around between technologies.
Maybe, this also leads to people making technology choices to improve their resume, regardless of what's best for the project. (I had never considered this might be a thing until a manager accused me of doing this, although he had to back down when I walked him through the research and rationale.)
I'd like to know more about your story before I'd comment on it. It is hard to believe that given the current labor market for developers there's no work available. Some companies have primitive recruiting policies, I grant you that. Those might not be available for you under certain circumstances.
Maybe you could work for a smaller company that desperately needs people. Work there for 6 month, get a recommendation letter and climb the ladder. That should work around your problem of not having a sellable track record.
People mess up their technology careers because they are lazy. It's your responsibility to keep your skills up to date, not your employers. I started out with COBOL and every technology I've learned since then was learned on my own time. My experience was often earned working nights on side gigs and open-source projects.
The learning curve is your friend. It's why developers are paid so well. If you can stay on top of it and manage your money well, you will be a multimillionaire by the time you retire. You can't say that about many career paths.
For VB6 programming Microsoft have just announced "Windows 10 is designed to run Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 software programs. And yes, everyone’s favorite VB6 Runtime will continue to work, too."
It seems some skills never go out of fashion.
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