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I'm 62 years old and still working as a maintenance programmer. I started programming for a living in 1973 (yes - almost forty years ago). It's been a battle the past few years to convince people that I can still learn new things at my "advanced" age (that's real age discrimination). The other battle I've had to fight is the push to move me to management. I never wanted to manage. I always wanted to do maintenance programming and I am good at it.
I've been working in my current job for about fourteen years. Our applications were written in VB6 starting in about 1999 and one was converted to VB.NET about five years ago. I don't feel that I'm that out of date but I certainly don't feel like learning any new languages any more. A lot of what a programmer does is not tied into the language. It's transportable to new languages and new machines. I did a lot with C for several years and I don't feel uncomfortable working in C#.
I can't get over people complaining about COM and working with DLLs. Try maintaining a few million lines of assembly code developed over fifteen years that uses custom hardware that no one else in the world uses.
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I hear you. I'm 52 and looking for a new job. I've been with my current company almost 8 years. I am a C/C++ heavy hitter (and have been for a long time). I've learned Python and Java in the last year. But I still can't convince interviewers that the gray hair/bald head doesn't mean the brain has hardened.
-- Martin Goff
mlgoff@commspeed.net
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Same with me. I am 53 and just got a job after being out of work for almost 21 months, aside from a couple of contract jobs. I started back in high school in 1973 and left college to become a full time programmer in 1977.
I have written a multi-user/multi-tasking operating system, several language interpreters and compilers (one of which used a virtual machine I invented), debuggers, libraries, etc. Projects that could have been for a Masters or Doctoral thesis.
But since there was no call for those skills here I decided to go back to school to pick up new skills and to work on finally getting my degree. Now I have a job and I am going to school, which leaves me very little time for anything else. I figure picking up some new skills and a degree can't hurt for the future.
Many jobs out there seem to want certifications to "prove" you know something. All that proves is that at the time you knew how to answer questions on a test. At one place we had a guy with a doctorate in Computer Science that was worthless. Turns out all he knew how to do was copy code from somewhere and try to massage it so it sort of worked. If it didn't he had very little chance of fixing it. One time he wrote a sort routine inside out and backwards, guaranteeing that it took the maximum time to sort the data, which meant the communication link waiting for the data got dropped due to a timeout. We finally had to fire him.
But try and convince some HR person that past work is a better indicator than a piece of paper. Heck, they often don't understand what they are hiring for! just look at how they word (or misspell) the ad for the job sometime!
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that's why I'm going back to school this fall too. Today, you need to paper to get the interview.
-- Martin Goff
mlgoff@commspeed.net
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I've run into a few developers like that too. They are great at architecture and writing new code but some of them can't debug code at all. My job most of my career has been to follow behind developers and make their code work after they are done with it.
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I am also 53 years old and while I have done a lot of job hopping in the past 8 years since the dot com bubble burst I have been generally able to find a new position within a month or two. It's pretty easy to blame our age for all of the troubles finding new positions. It could be a person's interviewing skills are not what they should be especially when they have been working at the same position for over a decade. It could also be that the person in question is as valuable in the market as they believe they are.
It is true that a kid coming out of school with a graduate degree may know nothing real-world coming into a company it has been my experience that they usually come on line very quickly and become real producers in a short time. You don't need a graduate degree to be sharp, but you need to be sharp to get a graduate degree; they don't just hand PhD degrees out as door prizes. Don't be so quick to discount his education or abilities, part of the reason why he didn't work out could be communication issues if he wasn't a native English speaker or your system might have been so dysfunctional that he couldn't work within it without assistance which he may not have received.
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That was not the case here. He was no kid and he was writing new code. I was called in and pointed out the problem in his code. He then spent 2 weeks trying to "fix" it. He was finally taken off of it and the code was fixed and tested using my suggested method within an hour.
I am not saying everyone with a degree is like that, just that having a degree does not mean that you are killed and competent because you have it.
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I've applied and interviewed for a couple of jobs recently because our company was acquired by another company who has their own applications similar to ours. They really don't want to switch to using ours and theirs are all in Java so my job is not very secure any more. That was a couple of years ago and now I'm in range for retiring if I can't get a job. I'll just collect unemployment for as long as I can stretch it and then retire. I found that the only way to get an interview is to fudge your resume a little by trimming it to the last ten years or so. I dropped my math degree from 1970 in favor of a CS degree I picked up in 1996 when I was out of work the last time. The next hurdle to clear is getting into the interview and them seeing (as you say) the bald head and grey hair. I think I was able to sell myself pretty well in the interview as having the experience they needed but after a month of indecision I got an email saying that their plans had changed and they would not be hiring me.
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I know what you mean, i've been there. Got a new job at 52 , began as part time with a bunch of 5 VB6 programmers, lucky for me it was not hard to make greater code and more challenging project. I wrote the Intranet/Internet platform on my spare time, just to prove that i can do better that anyone, and i got the job full time. Most of those that make the interview does not look at the knowledge you have but how good you're gonna be a yes sir. But they are not all like that, so hang on, you will get something, and be positive ... in an interview they can sense what are you're feelings. 98% of these young peoples, just do programming at the office and they don't seek much for new ways on how to do things better, that is your'r strenght, cause after all you are a member of code project, and that tell me that you have the heart.
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earl, I'm right there with you... but I don't think any one would hire me now. Been out the door for over 10 years now after they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
tom
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Earl Truss wrote: I don't feel that I'm that out of date but I certainly don't feel like learning any new languages any more.
Why not? Unless you are learning something very exotic (like Prolog), it shouldn't take you more than a month to learn a new language.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: Earl Truss wrote:
I don't feel that I'm that out of date but I certainly don't feel like learning any new languages any more.
Why not? Unless you are learning something very exotic (like Prolog), it shouldn't take you more than a month to learn a new language.
I agree that it shouldn't take much time to learn a new language. I just choose not to unless I have to. My current job is probably my last one and in my next life I will probably have more interesting things to do.
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Rob Philpott wrote:
IT has always been a young man's game because the skill is so new, and I've been concerned for a while what I'll do when I get into my late 40s, it's incredibly ageist, and I suspect getting employment however good you are or how well your CV reads is going to be difficult (or low paid). Most of the people I work with are quite a bit younger than me generally. That said, I do know people who look for those in at least their 30s, who have done some heavy duty stuff like C++ in their past before everything became Mickey Mouse and everyone jumped on-board.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just stay current and you'll find that age doesn't make any difference. I retired at age 62 and they're still calling me to see if I can come back to work on this project and that project. I've been in "the business" since 1966; the '70s were a boom for IT people and it's still the best career you can have. It's a big city business unless you're satisfied maintan
ing legacy Cobol or RPGIII apps. After a brief tour as a manager in a small telephone company in rural Georgia, at age 55, I finally responded to some of the calls I had been getting and came back to Atlanta, happy as a bird.
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Started in 1968 with OCR programming, and have never looked back. I loved COBOL because it paid a lot of bills, and besides, none of the new kids want anything to do with it. I would love to just work a couple of months fixing some problem and then go back to relaxing..
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"Now you are 35 years old. In case you get the job, you would be the oldest man in the company. How do you think you could cope with that?"
I did not get that job - that was in 2003, already a couple of years ago...
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In college, my co-op job. VAX BASIC, system management, and operations on a MicroVAX 3600.
I had to use BASIC because that's what the boss knew.
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I'm the same, but I wasn't being payed until AFTER college.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction.
My work here is done.
or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
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Same here, except it was SABRE and REBATE2 (proprietary test languages used with automatic test systems). That said, I was employed as a systems engineer at the time (I jumped to a pure software career in 1996) so back then I actually spent more time working on hardware or writing technical reports than doing software. In some ways that was a blessing as the software environment there at the time was primitive compared to what I had access to at home!
I finally succeeded in introducing C to that department (on a 6809!) in 1993, and C++ in 1995.
Anna ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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My first programming job was developing software on an HP-1000 minicomputer in FORTRAN 66.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I remember those.
My first development job was in 1979 on a IBM System34 using RPG.
Those were the days!
if (ToErr == Human.Nature)
{
Forgive = Divine;
}
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Ah yes, I remember my first back in '79. This cute little PDP-11 only knew FORTRAN-77 and she had her way w/ me!
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I startet programming in 1984 ... Osborne 1.
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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'78, Apple II
'85 moved to the amiga and C++
why'd they stop at 20?...Is that age discrimination? 
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maybe they think there where no programmers before the 80´s
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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