Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain? 418
Talcyon writes "I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support. I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area. I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it? Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software? I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others. Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?"
You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others.
Right, this sounds somewhat similar to this question [slashdot.org] and you can take or leave my old advice [slashdot.org]. Some good replies to my post as well.
I don't get it. This is such a fatalistic and defeated attitude! Will I, too, give up the ghost at age 40? I don't think you're ever too old to learn something knew but I'm 30 years old and my idea of a fun weekend is reviewing a book on a new fledgling language or framework. And there's plenty of room for criticism for me concentrating on diversity rather than depth.
I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support.
I'm sorry. Honestly, I really am sorry. I don't like that framework, I don't like that language. Also when I was growing up it was largely a "pay to play" realm and largely still is (although I know I can get my hands on an express IDE).
I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area.
Again, a fatalistic attitude. It's possible you never found a good role of management for you. It requires more time but there's always a "lead by example" model for leadership. It's not as easy as delegating but you can earn a lot more respect. It does suck up a lot more of your time though. Also, good companies offer at least two ways to advance in development. One is management and the other is technical lead. If your company has technical leadership roles you could look into them.
Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software?
Look, if you hate your job, get out of it. I don't care if you're 40 and have a mortgage to pay, start looking for something else that makes you happier than where you are now. Life is too short. You can't waste years hating your work. Support role will probably pay the bills but it's gonna suck, I suggest you give it a go and pick up some new languages in your free time and work on projects that you can host on github, Heroku or some VPS even if they are just functional and have no users. You can at least put those on your resume and say "I made this by myself and I can make stuff like this for you."
Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?
It would be a lot easier if you were asking me how you get from A to B but what I'm hearing is "I'm at A and it sucks so do I retrain or what do I do here?" Tell me what you want to do, tell me what satisfies you at the end of the day and I'll tell you how to get there. That "or am I too old" part at the end of your question isn't even an option. It's quite inane, actually. How daft would I have to be to say "Naw, dude, you're forty years old, you're long in the tooth, your bones are half dust, you've got one foot in the grave, you're on borrowed time, give it up already and just roll over. Me, on the other hand, I'm never gonna be in your shoes, no sir. Gonna be twenty one FOREVER and Java's always going to be the de facto standard or I'll just YOLO out." I mean, seriously, who's going to answer that way?
I am 45 (Score:5, Insightful)
I never ask myself this question. When faced with a new technology I dive in, start tearing in with gusto, and master it.
If you need to ask yourself this question, maybe you are just tired of being a developer in general.
Learn some php and javascript (Score:0, Insightful)
Or python
or meteor
if you know how to code, you can find work, you just need to get away from .net
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:3, Insightful)
/thread.
Retrain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I've never understood the idea of needing to be "trained" to program or build software or systems. Why not just figure out how to do it? If you can't figure out how to solve problems and be valuable in something besides VB.NET, then maybe age isn't really the issue.
Been there, done that (Score:3, Insightful)
Family (Score:4, Insightful)
I find the problem is not so much age but family. I've got 2 kids and I can't spend as much time engrossed in tech as I used to. This is depressing, but I rely on my coworkers to understand as I grow as a person into, hopefully, something more than the straight tech I was before as I learn patience and other traits from having to deal with my life as a father and husband.
VB.NET ? Seriously ? (Score:2, Insightful)
(I'm going to disregard every single anecdotal evidence that is going to pop)
I started my career as an ASM developer, coding firmwares. Later I did projects in C and C++. I've seen serious projects in several languages, ranging from COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, FORTH, REXX, DELPHI, JAVA, C# and a few others.
If you want to get ahead in your career, stop playing with TOY languages. VB.NET is ok if you are doing a small 1-2 person project to manage your uncle's gas station, or something equivalent. If you want to work big corp, you need something that works for big projects. And that means more than just switching languages. You need to rethink your whole methodology. Software modeling, UML, the whole shebang.
If you want to be a 1 man shop, then you need to focus on reusability, portability and things like that. That means JAVA.
Script languages like RUBY and Python might also be a good idea if you want to go into web development.
So, what should you do ? I ask a different question: what can you afford to do ? Can you afford the time and costs of retraining ? What will you do in the mean time ? This switch is going to take you a couple years, most likely.
You need to understand your options a little better before deciding what you should do. Who knows, maybe a complete career change is in order. I'm a bit younger than you, and I'm working on switching out of IT. It is a 5-8 years plan. Doesn't happen overnight either.
The Problem is NOT in your ability .... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not in your ability to learn new tech most likely - the problem will be that people will not want to hire you. Why is this? Several reasons:
1. You cost more. Even if you are willing to work the same wages you will be perceived as costing more.
2. Your medical insurance costs to the company will be higher. Even if you don't actually use that insurance the company will be charged higher rates if they have an older workforce.
3. You will be perceived as willing to work less. Maybe you have a family or heaven forbid - a life! Unlike a 22 year old who likely has neither of these things you will probably be less likely to work 60 - 70 hour weeks on a salary.
4. Your boss will likely be younger than you and knows less. Hence you will be perceived as a threat.
So welcome to the wonderful world of I.T.! Now go away
Your best options for future career are to get out of development and into management or to start your own business.
Me? Eventually I opted to get out of the field and am retraining as an RN.
depends entirely on you (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, I'm a mite suspicious that this article is a plant. If being behind on .net was a career killer, we'd have folks jumping off their squat, ugly tilt-ups right and left. It'd be like 1929, with geeks.
At 40 the sky's the limit. At 40 I moved to a different state, got a job in a different field (shifting from tech to marketing) got married and had a kid. At 45 I changed careers again, (tech management) and again at 53 (business intelligence). Age is a number. It's will, focus, and energy that's important. You can always retrain, regroup, and succeed, if you have the will. Reading your article, I suspect you're having fun with us, but if you actually feel that way, and don't just need minor assurance, you've already lost.
Short answer: You can hone your skills or retrain at any age. If you think you can't, that'll be true also. It's up to you.
Re:.NET 5.0 isn't *that* different from .NET 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Retrain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is an idea for the original guy. Say these words 'what do you want me to work on?'
If your boss says 'uh i dont know' move on or find something to work on that interest you.
Someone asked me a few days ago 'what language do you work in'. I responded 'whatever I need to use at the moment there are plenty to choose from in this project'. "you a linux guy or windows guy" "again whatever I need to work on in this project".
Again for the original guy you have cornered yourself as a 'I am a xyz guy'. Move up to the "I am a person who produces results using the tools I have available".
Specialization can produce very good results for your paycheck on a short term period. But in the computer realm specialization can get axed in 2 seconds by anything (merger, replacement tool, cut backs, whatever). Then you are stuck with 'starting over'. That can be acid on your resume.
For example I have learned java, .net, and python in the past couple of years and dabbling with perl. Not because I particularly like them. I think they are crazy in the pre-reqs department. But that is not the point. I need them to do my job. People come to me about my 'old stuff' (c, c++, tsql, atl, win32, mfc) I joke with them "i have no idea how to do that" then show them how to do it. I actually like the old stuff I worked on. But you know what I will not be able to work with it any more unless something else pops up. I have to deal with that.
If you stay as the 'xyz guy' yes you will be out of a job and replaced soon enough.
Will do! Can do!
Too old !?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Got Nothing to Do With Age (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm 42. I've been a Unix/Linux sysadmin since I was in college -- about twenty years now. Or I was. You see, last year, I got a job with a new company, and after I'd been there about four months, my boss came to me and said, "Hey, you know how we've been looking for a new programmer? Well, we noticed you'd done some programming in the past (which I had, in college for my CS degree, as a hobby, and writing Perl and Bash as a sysadmin), and we're having a much easier time finding sysadmins than programmers, so we're wondering if you'd consider trying being a programmer."
I said yes -- with the agreement that if I wound up really hating it, I could go back to my old job. In the six months since then, I've gotten up to speed with modern Java (last time I'd touched it was way back when Sun was originally introducing it) and the Spring framework. The programmer who did most of our DBA stuff left in the course of that, and since I was the guy who was least important on the programming side of things, I also got tasked with taking over that -- so I'm learning MySQL administration now.
It's working out fine. I've found that I can't do like I used to in college, and read a book on a new subject and retain a ton of it without any real effort... but I don't need to. I've got enough general tech background knowledge that I can quickly find out what I need to know, when I need to know it. The stuff I do on a regular basis starts to stick pretty quickly -- and for the minutiae, it's really enough that I can remember "Oh, I read something about that." These days, with Google, if I remember that much, I've generally got the answer within ten minutes. Often less.
Some of the stuff I'm learning, I'm having fun with it. Some of it I'm not, but hey, it's a job -- if I enjoyed it all, they'd make me pay them to come here. And my old knowledge is still coming in handy -- when the systems crew can't figure something out, they come to me to ask about it. My old non-Java programming experience still applies in a lot of ways, and my knowledge of networks and Linux is often useful as well.
Honestly, unless something goes physically wrong with my brain, I can't see me ever stopping learning -- hell, my dad's in his 70s, and he's still learning new things keeping up his hobby of restoring and working on cars. It might get slower, but really, the big thing is just to keep going. If you give up and stop, you definitely won't learn whatever new thing you're trying to learn.
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd elaborate on the parent post, but it's hard to, since he covered a mountain of ground.
I'm approaching my mid-40s. I'm still learning new things, almost on a weekly basis as new things pop up. In my humble opinion, OP is approaching the question wrong - it's not "should I re-train", it rather should be: "...why did I let my otherwise continuous training slip so horribly?"
I know the answer, sort of. It's hard to get deep into a new language when the kids bug you with requests or questions that never end, and the wife wants to know when you are going to put that damned laptop down and cuddle with her in front of some stupid chick flick that you'll instantly forget once it's over. On the other hand, in this biz, you have to keep the training continuous. Slow down, and you fall behind... unless you specialize in COBOL or FORTRAN, falling behind too much is pretty detrimental to one's career.
As for the management thing, maybe it was just a shit position? I've done the management thing, and still do when the job calls for it... I find that the 'people person' skills are a minor (albeit powerful) part of it - the majority is paper-shoveling and leadership, coupled with a knack for keeping a billion disparate tasks prioritized as they arise and (hopefully) in deadline. I've seen asshats with a complete lack of people skills succeed wildly in management, simply because they can keep ten thousand different priorities and tasks all wired tight and done on time. May want to give that another go, but do it in a way that you report to other people - hopefully under people who are good mentors this time around.
Overall, yeah... it sounds like a life change/decision. Personally, follow what you love to do, and to hell with the rest. Dying a happy old retired garbageman or janitor is far preferable to dying as a miserable middle-aged CEO, yanno? It's your life - do what *you* want to do with it. Even if you (eventually) retire as a code-monkey? If you enjoy it, then for heaven sakes - do it!
Re:VB.NET ? Seriously ? (Score:4, Insightful)
VB.Net is not a toy language.
Of course not. Toys are supposed to be fun.
Re:If you are too old to retrain... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am 62. Wrote my first nontrivial program in 1968. Learned java around 2001 and have been part of large java projects since then. For the last five years I have been working in the area of bioinformatics and the associated big data. I also have been picking up large chunks of statistics and reviving my linear math skills in the last few years all as part of a VC funded start up.
You are only as old as you think you are. Just get on with it, life it is too much fun to restrict it with worries about whether you are too old or too anything else.
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent poster basically won the internet award for the day, heed his words.
Programming at it's core is creative work, and if that's what you love you need to stick with it a form that fulfills your passion and talents. For example, with your time in the field consider if you have what it takes to do more senior development work:
- it's not management though you will be responsible for code review and progress meetings
- you're less code-monkey and more architect which lessens the burden of bringing peak knowledge of new languages to the table
Q/A is also a relatively good side of things to consider. You need a functional understanding of code, but the work focus is shifted to your analysis skills on how real-world scenarios will beat the living tar out of someone's project :)
At this stage you're going to want to recognize your experience with software and the environments they run in as much as being able to make f(x)=y. It's very honest to recognize that you're not a people person, but that doesn't mean well-paying specialist jobs like what's above are out of your reach.
-Matt
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a hint. If you don't want to be sidelined as you get older, you must take all those years of experience and make them valuable.
People will hire you, at good rates, if you provide value. If they can get the same from a 20 year old, then they're not going to pay you enough to make it worth it. You have to give them something they can't get from a 20 year old.
Experience.
That means being better at your job than a 20 year old. Knowing when to make the right moves and when to mea culpa. Knowing what NOT to do. Becoming good at your job.
The original poster seems to have made the mistake that he didn't stay on top of things. And now he has a long hard haul to get back up to speed, plus he needs go the extra mile that makes him worth paying for.
If you didn't actually gain experience... that is, you just did the same things over and over without really thinking about it... then you might as well go flip burgers.
Otherwise, take control over your future.
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:5, Insightful)
was it not sticking, or did you get to the age where you realised you didn't give quite as much a damn over the next damn thing that's been pushed as the next big thing only to realise it was just crap?
That's what happened to me, but fortunately I had already given up bothering to learn all the new nonsense that is designed to make you buy the next version of whatever toolset they want you to buy, and concentrated my efforts on actually making stuff that works (properly, ie I no longer really cared what technology I used, the product was the thing for me).
Mind, we're now doing an "agile" system that isn't anywhere near as agile as the iterative development I used to do 15 years ago... and the tooling is auto-conf magic bits that "just work" (yeah, right, until it doesn't). So maybe it wasn't me but the dumbed down kiddie tech we're pushed to work with.
Re:The Problem is NOT in your ability .... (Score:4, Insightful)
In Germany you are not constantly expected to work overtime. In fact it is highly undesired by employers(that'd be me) and employees. Medical insurance is tied to income and in the end comes out of the employees pocket. You may need more salary due to family, kids, mortgage, Porsche and so on but you'll get it if you are worth it.
At the moment and for the last couple of years it has become really hard to hire experienced, battle-scarred techs because there aren't any left on the market.
One of my team members tried to settle down in the US a couple of years ago and he didn't get any offers. A couple of would-be employers even called me in Germany for references(forgetting the whole time-zone thing, I might add) and I can tell you your hiring process, the work conditions and job security suck major ass. The questions they asked me were dorky, fuzzy, and cover-your-ass stuff. In one instance I even had to phone the guy to ask him if it was OK to answer since asking some things during the hiring process is down-right illegal here.
It's like watching the world through Charles Dickens goggles. And we even spent the last 10 years downsizing benefits for everybody.
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:5, Insightful)
Just nitpicking: programming is not a creative work. It is doing the obvious nevessary steps to transform a requirement into code. Or fix a bug.
The creative work is called: development or design or architecture.
Re:If you are too old to retrain... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you believe you're too old, you're too old (Score:4, Insightful)
As for me, at 59, I am still programming professionally and learning whatever I need to get the job done
The most important skill a programmer has is logical problem solving
The particular details of languages and tools are relatively unimportant
I definitely don't consider myself to be "too old"
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno. I'm 41, and I still love tech and still love learning. But with age my horizons have broadened and tech isn't the central focus of my life anymore. It doesn't bother me if some great new thing comes out and I don't hear about it until a few days or weeks later.
And my learning is much more based on practical matters these days. When I learned Perl, I did it because it sounded cool and I just plain wanted to learn it. Now I don't invest the time unless it's either going to make me money, or I'm going to put it to use in my home somehow.
I can definitely relate to the OP. I still love technology and learning, but my interests are much more broad these days and I find it more satisfying to spend a weekend relaxing on a boat or hiking in the woods than sitting at a keyboard learning some obscure language just to be able to say I know it.
Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.
And I'm 52.