+ - Tech's Dark Secret: It’s All About Age 2
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theodp
theodp writes "Universities really should tell engineering students what to expect in the long term and how to manage their technical careers. But since they're not, Vivek Wadwha uses his TechCrunch bully pulpit to give students a heads-up about the road ahead. Citing ex-Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch's belief that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative, Wadwha warns that reports of ageism's death have been greatly exaggerated. While encouraging managers to consider the value of the experience older techies bring, Wadwha also offers some get-real advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey: 1) Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design; switch to sales or product management; jump ship and become an entrepreneur. 2) If you're going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you, so be prepared to earn less as you gain experience. 3) Keep your skills current — to be coding for a living when you're 50, you'll need to be able to out-code the new kids on the block. Wadwha's piece strikes a chord with 50-something Dave Winer, who calls the rampant ageism 'really f***ed up,' adding that, 'It's probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so.' Well, Microsoft did struggle with problems that IBM solved in the '60s."
Age-ism or just willful ignorance? (Score:1)
I was brought into my current job about eight years ago, ostensibly to bring PM and SDLC process to the wild west of application development in my department. The mainframers wanted nothing to do with process improvement, saying they had everything under control. The client/server and web folks gave me the "we're different, old rules don't apply" argument. I asked around, looked through old documentation, anything to get a feel for where this group was at and what they'd done. After about six weeks, I d
Who wants to be an old programmer? (Score:1)