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Then Bob gets another job at another company or another project within the same company. Bob is kind of like a home builder/home architect and real estate developer all wrapped into one(comparing from software to real estate). When the housing development is completed and all homes are built, then Bob's job is done.
Gone are the days when one person stays at the same company for many years. We have turned into 'resources' and we're placed into projects with budgeted dollars and due dates next to our names. We must keep up our skill set at all times and be ready to go onto the next opportunity. And you want to be in a technology that always is growing, somewhere. And gain new emerging technologies along the way because they'll increase your demand in the future as those technologies expand and prior technologies diminish. It's a constant evolution and you must keep your eye on the future and try to have a crystal ball to determine what might be relevant skills/technologies that will keep you 'in demand' in the near future.
I am "Bob" in many ways. It's quite fun. I kind of like being a budgeted line item on a corporate spreadsheet.
Then Bob gets another job at another company or another project within the same company. Bob is kind of like a home builder/home architect and real estate developer all wrapped into one(comparing from software to real estate). When the housing development is completed and all homes are built, then Bob's job is done.
Gone are the days when one person stays at the same company for many years. We have turned into 'resources' and we're placed into projects with budgeted dollars and due dates next to our names. We must keep up our skill set at all times and be ready to go onto the next opportunity. And you want to be in a technology that always is growing, somewhere. And gain new emerging technologies along the way because they'll increase your demand in the future as those technologies expand and prior technologies diminish. It's a constant evolution and you must keep your eye on the future and try to have a crystal ball to determine what might be relevant skills/technologies that will keep you 'in demand' in the near future.
I am "Bob" in many ways. It's quite fun. I kind of like being a budgeted line item on a corporate spreadsheet.
I agree with this. People can no longer view employers as parents taking care of their flock in exchange for decades of loyalty.
so you would rather no one 20-30 are given the opportunity to learn it instead? Cerner in KC does the opposite, they hire college grads then mentors/grooms them into the roles the company needs, no bad skills to unlearn, does things how they want, etc. As they develop, get old, they become the next generation of mentors there as they move up. Pretty good way of running the company and everyone seems happy. They do work people hard but pay well in return.
In BI and ETL we need people who can hit the ground running. Sorry.
There are plenty of other roles in I.T. where you can develop database development skills. You can also learn on your own.
In the environment I currently work in, we are working with such a terrible code base and are so disk-bound and processor-bound that we need rock stars. The ones writing dummy code that anyone could write are in India. There are no junior roles where I am: they've all been shipped offshore.
The actual work of development for social media applications requires no more knowledge of the social issues than any other types of software development. It is still about bits and bytes. The actual requirements gathering and concept might, but they are separate (these days) jobs.
Then Bob gets another job at another company or another project within the same company. Bob is kind of like a home builder/home architect and real estate developer all wrapped into one (comparing from software to real estate). When the housing development is completed and all homes are built, then Bob's job is done.
This has been the Husband's experience in the tech field. Four years ago he switched from software support to technical writing: he's now a senior technical writer at a Fortune 500 company. After less than a year he's received 3 substantial spot bonuses from his managers for excellence in his work, and the devs and writing teams would lead a revolt if he left because he can communicate with both sides in their languages. He's in his mid 40s.
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Gone are the days when one person stays at the same company for many years. We have turned into 'resources' and we're placed into projects with budgeted dollars and due dates next to our names. We must keep up our skill set at all times and be ready to go onto the next opportunity. And you want to be in a technology that always is growing, somewhere. And gain new emerging technologies along the way because they'll increase your demand in the future as those technologies expand and prior technologies diminish. It's a constant evolution and you must keep your eye on the future and try to have a crystal ball to determine what might be relevant skills/technologies that will keep you 'in demand' in the near future.
The Husband says one of the most important things his father taught him was that a company's loyalty is to its bottom line; do what you can to be ready to jump before you're pushed.
Younger people can do the same job, if not more efficient and cost a fraction of the price. If you were a business what business decision would you go with? It's not necessarily age discrimination as it is pay discrimination. If I pay Bob 125k/yr and I can hire a Steven for 60k/yr that does the same job, well I could hire two Stevens for the price of Bob.
Your deplorable grammar and punctuation hint at the quality of the work that these "efficient" young things frequently do (at a supposed "fraction of the price"). If I lose clients because of mistakes, and if I have to pay to have software rewritten, and to have damage fixed/compensated-for, then am hardly making money, am I?
I personally wouldn't hire a database developer under 30. It takes time to develop the level of expertise that good developers require in order to write solid, maintainable code.
LOL sorry BDG...you know employers don't care about that and 90% don't even know what it means. Just like GM and Toyota and their defective cars. If the code has security holes or memory leaks or other bad features...they'll fix it when somebody finds out...or it makes itself evident. In the world at large, doing things right takes a back seat to making money. And for stuff like software, which many CEO's don't really even understand in any detail, when you talk about quality you are just wasting your breath.
I think the only place where that matters is maybe with some types of device software...but knowing what I know about the mistakes in medical device programming, for instance...I'm not so sure. IMO the best way to get qualified staff is to have programming tests and training programs for the staff...as opposed to looking at age.
When I was younger I worked with some older people who knew their sh_t...and sadly a few who were full of sh_t. Colleagues would know the difference, but some managers don't have a clue because they do not have technical knowledge. IMO database development (most of what I've done in my so-called career) is pretty easy LOL no offense, compared to some of the work we could be doing. Someone under 30 could do a good job at it.
Age doesn't matter at all in this industry. What matters is your skills and knowledge. I'm in my lower 40s and last year a Google recruiter contacted me to see if I'd be interested in working there. Same thing with the Amazon Web Services team, they contacted me out of the blue based on what they had read in my blog. If anything I know more about my job and how to do it better now than when I was in my 20s.
One of the quoted articles above mentions the company Service now. We'll, I've got a friend who's is 44yo and he was just hired by ServiceNow two months ago. I've got another friend, he's a Java developer, he's 50yo and he was just hired at Apple as a Principal Software Engineer.
I haven't seen any age discrimination whatsoever here in Silicon Valley.
Google contacted me too. I told them NO. Their business model is profiting off of other people's intellectual property...just like Facebook. In honor of the memory what the internet was meant to be before it was sold lock, stock and barrel to advertisers, I'd never willingly work there.
Maybe they're doing some sort of go catch the old people campaign LOL because of all this talk about age discrimination. You're already over there in Northern Cali...so I'll assume you're a millionaire or very well off. They'd have to pay me 3 million dollar signing bonus/relocation and 200K per year to have the same quality of life that I've built for myself here.
If I sold my house, what type of shack would I have to live in if I moved to Northern California? A 2000 K per month rented shack, I'd bet. The only draw is the plethora of cute smart guys who are over there. LOL but it is WAY too expensive.
Google actually has less age discrimination now that it did in the past. Their attitude towards hiring was forged by Marissa Meyer. She was obsessed with GPA, age, stack ranking, etc. The weird thing was it was mainly applied to engineers, and the requirements for managers were a lot fuzzier. This led to an overhiring of mediocre MBA people as product managers from 2006-2010 and is why they have so many hare brained projects like G+. That same attitude really bit her at Yahoo when she fired all the old programmers but didn't vet de Castro and he absconded with a $58M golden parachute for doing nothing. Anyway, once she left, Google radically changed how they hire people. A lot of 40+ year olds wind up there now, something that would have been unthinkable 4 years ago.
I agree with this. People can no longer view employers as parents taking care of their flock in exchange for decades of loyalty.
Bingo
Quote:
Originally Posted by lucy1965
This has been the Husband's experience in the tech field. Four years ago he switched from software support to technical writing: he's now a senior technical writer at a Fortune 500 company. After less than a year he's received 3 substantial spot bonuses from his managers for excellence in his work, and the devs and writing teams would lead a revolt if he left because he can communicate with both sides in their languages. He's in his mid 40s.
The Husband says one of the most important things his father taught him was that a company's loyalty is to its bottom line; do what you can to be ready to jump before you're pushed.
Absolutely correct.
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Nailed it. 
They'd have to pay me 3 million dollar signing bonus/relocation and 200K per year to have the same quality of life that I've built for myself here.
