How to grow old in IT
After several years of ridicule of prejudices in the field of information technology, I, being a white man with not at all gray, thick hair, begin to face a prejudice against my age. It is true age discrimination is real.
Since 2008, the number of complaints of age discrimination has increased to 25,000 per year . It can be argued that we are forced to “spin” everywhere now and there will always be someone who complains of some kind of injustice. Of course, OK! Let's not take complaints into account. Just look at the average age of employees of well-known IT companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30. To see objectively - the average age of an employee in the United States is 42 years. This is much higher than the average age in the above companies. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself once publicly spoke at an event at Stanford : “I want to emphasize the importance of being young and technically prepared. Young people are just smarter. ”
I have 3 years left to 60, and, of course, I am highly sensitive to this topic. Having an idea of ​​what the gray hair in the mustache carries with me, I am in a good position to debunk the promoted approach of the “young smarter”. Let me point out what I have been doing for all my decades of work — yes, decades, plural — to remain able-bodied and share with those who are getting older (and this applies to everyone) what can be done to avoid writing off as soon as you pass for 30.
"Young smarter." Nonsense! Does this mean that companies should not have recruited Sandy Metz , Kent Beck or Robert Martin (Uncle Bob)? All of them are veterans with 30 years of experience. “They are just anomalies.” I don’t think!
')
Six years ago, with the help of John Stehler, I developed kettlerusa.com . I did the front end on Groovy and Grails, and John did the server application on the RPG. John is the best programmer I've ever worked with. At the same time, John had very little left until a very solid round figure of age. But look at the age of John from the perspective of a small story. I regularly check the work site kettlerusa.com, buying on it the cheapest product - balls for table tennis. I often forget to cancel my orders, because of what I get a lot of packages with these balls. At the same time, I remember well “Captain Kangaroo”, which was a popular children's TV series from 1955 to the mid-70s. His hero, Captain Kangaroo, was regularly hit by ping-pong balls as a result of his friend’s pranks . Once in a conversation with John, I called my growing stock of ping-pong balls Captain Kangaroo. Naturally, I thought that John watched this show. But when I saw that he was confused by my used name, I described several scenes from films to him. John's answer seemed unexpected: “Don, I grew up when there was no TV yet. It was the beginning of the 50s. ”Yes, John was not only from the era before Node.js, before Ruby, before Java and before the Internet — he was even from the era before TV. And yet there is no better programmer than him - in RPG or the like. Even including proclaiming themselves "smarter" 30-year-olds and younger.
Yes. OK He works with RPG. Want an example where a programmer writes on something different from an "antique" RPG? What about HTML5, JavaScript and C #? Then read my blog about Jim Stanitsky - it was he who introduced me to this area in the early 80s.
When I hear someone talking about 20 years of experience, I am curious - this is indeed the case, or in fact it was the 1st year of experience 20 times. I know a lot of developers who used the knowledge gained in the first year of work, then throughout the rest of their careers. I saw this on the IBM AS / 400 RPG market with 40-50 year old people, but I saw the same thing with some 30 year old Java developers. In the early 2000s, I traveled around the country, conducting Java workshops for RPG developers. I expected that these developers know the modern modular programming methods on RPG, but it turned out that most of them still use the old-school RPG methods. They stopped increasing their core skill set - and began to acquire less new ones. Then in 2008-10 I taught Java developers at Circuit City to work with Groovy and Grails. This nation was at the age of about 30, and they were completely satisfied with the good old Java with its “write everything yourself”, “don't be puzzled by frameworks”, etc.
My position, of course, is not to find out that these younger developers were smarter than me or not. The problem is that many programmers allow themselves to freeze. And the main problem is that after performing the same operations ten times over the years, these programmers forget how to learn. Not only can catch-up technology, which is ten years old, be extremely difficult - it can be almost impossible if you forget how to learn.
If you plan to stay in the IT field for more than 10 years, you need to learn all your life. I have always been a lifelong student. I have studied and developed many programming languages, structures and strategies. As a result, I acquired the skills necessary for learning. Case in point: I was told that it was impossible to learn a second language when I was over 50. And now I say to you: this is not true. I started learning Italian when I was 52 years old. Now I read and listen to daily Italian stories and move through the “spoken” language. And as a result, for me to learn another programming language or some kind of structure is a simple matter.
Kent Beck suggested that with the sequential use of pair programming, the possibilities of programmers do not differ much after two years of work. It is clear that this operates in an environment where methods and skills can be easily shared. In an environment where knowledge of veterans becomes common. My first reaction when I first heard it a few decades ago was as follows: 1) compare myself and other developers as often as possible in pairs and in another way, and 2) I don’t think that my many years of experience guarantee competitiveness or higher wages.
I often say that I am essentially - just what I have done in the past two years. I could talk about all my work for thirty years, such as, for example, replacing the use of System / 3 punch cards on AS / 400, writing a debugger for Kobol or ... But, I'm afraid you will be bored. I have done something that might interest you only in the last two years. Among them: developing an open source search engine ElasticSearch and learning how to work with it, configuring many applications on OpsWorks AWS, installing Docker for many client applications, translating Rails 2.x applications to Rails 4.2, upgrading Ruby 1.9 to 2.2 and improving Git efficiency and, more precisely, GitHub.
Forget my age. I bet that my list of works for the last two years is at least as good as that of any 20-30 year old. The main question here is: what can I call my achievements in two years, starting from this point in time?
Approach this year as if it were your first year of working as a developer, and learn everything you can. Recover the energy that you had in the first year of programming. Remember that drive when you wanted to prove to yourself and your colleagues that you are “cool” in this IT field. Start reading technical literature again, try new methods and ask colleagues to teach you. Re-experience the excitement of working with other developers to generate new knowledge. Constantly study and research all forms of education, including:
• Podcasts
• I like Greater Than Code and The Bike Shed .
• webcast
• Ruby programmers continue to prefer RailsCasts , and I recently enjoy Ruby Tapas .
• Magazines and newsletters
• I subscribe to the following: InfoQ , Ruby Weekly , DZone Daily Digest .
• I also have a ThoughtWorks Radar subscription to know the most advanced techniques.
• Interactive online courses
• I was a Rails instructor at CareerFoundry , but there are hundreds of options.
• Conferences and seminars
• Try to attend one conference per year. Remember that you can often find out more in the hall of a conference room than by listening to the performances themselves.
• If you are unable to go to a conference, then use the fact that many meetings are available online. I recommend the site confreaks.tv/conferences , which contains meetings of dozens of conferences.
• Blogs
• Track several quality blogs — such as Corgibytes and Giant Robots Smashing on Other Giant Robots — where you can get new posts.
• Regularly run your own blog, post posts. Everyone can offer a solution to problems or can give an approach that will help others. Additionally - writing posts on a blog helps to consolidate knowledge.
Also take the time to understand which type of training is best for you. Do you learn better from books (my case) or do you need an audience? Do you learn better by ear? But, regardless of your style of study, try to learn something new every day.
Lack of work is not an excuse for not trying to deal with new methods and technologies. You do not need to be hired to get experience. Run your own online project. Cloud hosters can be completely or almost free in the absence of many visitors. Get off with some stupid idea and implement it. Put the solution publicly on GitHub so others can see it. Perform a full cycle from the server database and maybe a small NoSQL to a simple front end. Then move this external interface to a one-page application, like Ember or React or Angular. Add a check with card processing.
The following is perhaps an unimportant idea for a startup, but it could give you a real world experience: a virtual lemonade. Create a website where anyone, using the current position of your phone, can see nearby shops with lemonade. This means that you will need to enter the geographic information system (GIS) and the database for such shops. It will be necessary to write server and client programs. Then you will need to ensure that customers can register their shop with your service. Maybe give them a notice about someone who is looking for their shop, so they can answer that they are open. Perhaps you will not become the next Zuckerberg, but you will undoubtedly get the full range of skills in this market.
I do not think it is necessary - as some employment counselors recommend - to try to look younger by experimenting with hair dye or plastic surgery. But what is required of you is the sensation of your energy. To remain relevant in an industry that seems to be aimed at young people, it is essential to be energetic and active. And overweight 50-year-old wheezing smoker does not give serious reason to expect the manifestation of vitality and energy.
A year or so ago, I conducted a two-week training seminar with about a dozen developers aged about 30 years. The training went on the 22nd floor, and every day, returning from the general dinner, I climbed the stairs. In the first two days, one or two people joined me, but then those who wanted were gone. It will be quite difficult to transfer you to the category of "fulfilled" when you cannot stay close to you.
Do not make excessive efforts just to prove your point. Be yourself. Only - the best part of himself. Fitness can be a simple daily energetic walk. It is possible to put on headphones and listen to some technical podcast on this walk. I watch webcasts while working out on a simulator in a fitness center, and listen to podcasts while rolling on a monocycle. I prefer a day workout: thanks to her, my head clears up in the middle of the day, and I feel refreshed, going back to work in the afternoon.
I do not think that it is necessary to go to any extreme measures to look younger. I could look younger just by shaving off my gray mustache (the hair on my head is still thick and have only a few gray patches). But I deserve this white hair and wrinkles; for me, they are signs of a life-experience. I would like someone to say to me somehow: “Hey, the eighties called, they want to get their mustache back.” “Great,” I would laugh. - "These mustaches deservedly got me from the eighties, so I will not give them up."
It doesn’t matter how old you are, but if you are a lazy guy, then you will be boring in any communication. Be interesting ... for yourself. Everyone gets some pleasure from their hobbies. It does not matter if others think that your hobby or your passion is strange or not quite normal. For example: I hold a bee and ride a one-wheeled bike. I also know the reenactors of the civil war - I would agree to deal with this matter only for a rather big sum, but these people delight me. I’m sure that if you don’t have a hobby, then you have hobbies that haven’t turned into a hobby yet. Having a hobby is essentially a fun form of lifelong learning.
I believe that it is necessary to immediately give clear information to potential employers about your age, so that you can immediately weed out employers with age discrimination. In what environment would you like to work: where are they looking at you as a dead weight, or where your energy and experience are valued? Below are the first two sentences from my cover letter to Corgibytes: “Your team is looking for a specialist with“ 7+ years of software development experience ”and“ a Polyglot programmer with 5+ years of experience in programming languages ​​and 2+ in frameworks ”. What do you say about 7+ years of C / C ++, 7+ years of Java, 2+ years of PHP, and then 3+ years of Ruby (not to mention 7+ years of RPG and Cobol, otherwise you can do arithmetic and calculate my age)? ” Thus, I gave ironic information about my age in the first paragraph.
I went through a significant pay cut three or four times in my career. We are talking about 10-20 thousand dollars a year (10-15%). And this is not because I lost my job. I left the workplace because I did not see for myself the opportunity for professional growth in the position held. I also refused places with high salaries when I felt that they would interfere with my professional development. Some of my transitions to another job turned out to be a bad choice, ending in a dead end, but I’m sure that I always walked away from some project, having gained valuable knowledge in this market.
I have seen that a lot of people focus on some technologies (for example, Lotus Notes and Domino), and after 10 years find out that they are no longer needed in this market. Even if you get a high salary, do not let the technical world pass you by. Be sure that you own the latest technology. And, if you can't do it in your current position, then maybe it's time to move on.
As I said before, yes, age discrimination is present and very noticeable. Our bodies are aging, and some people — like Zuckerberg, for example — will use it against us. But the biggest mistake would be to agree that our mind and spirit are also aging. Here is where we can stay "young."
Bob Dylan said it best:
"May you do it
build a ladder to the stars
And overcome her every step.
May you stay forever young.
Let you finally grow up
And you will become fair and faithful.
May you always know the truth
And you will see the radiance around you.
May you always be courageous
Strong, with proudly straightened back.
May you stay forever young.
Forever young, forever young,
May you remain forever young. ”
Notice that when Bob Dylan released his 33rd album “Together Through Life”, which became a hit in Britain, he was 68 years old.
Since 2008, the number of complaints of age discrimination has increased to 25,000 per year . It can be argued that we are forced to “spin” everywhere now and there will always be someone who complains of some kind of injustice. Of course, OK! Let's not take complaints into account. Just look at the average age of employees of well-known IT companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30. To see objectively - the average age of an employee in the United States is 42 years. This is much higher than the average age in the above companies. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself once publicly spoke at an event at Stanford : “I want to emphasize the importance of being young and technically prepared. Young people are just smarter. ”
I have 3 years left to 60, and, of course, I am highly sensitive to this topic. Having an idea of ​​what the gray hair in the mustache carries with me, I am in a good position to debunk the promoted approach of the “young smarter”. Let me point out what I have been doing for all my decades of work — yes, decades, plural — to remain able-bodied and share with those who are getting older (and this applies to everyone) what can be done to avoid writing off as soon as you pass for 30.
No homeland for a man of age?
"Young smarter." Nonsense! Does this mean that companies should not have recruited Sandy Metz , Kent Beck or Robert Martin (Uncle Bob)? All of them are veterans with 30 years of experience. “They are just anomalies.” I don’t think!
')
Six years ago, with the help of John Stehler, I developed kettlerusa.com . I did the front end on Groovy and Grails, and John did the server application on the RPG. John is the best programmer I've ever worked with. At the same time, John had very little left until a very solid round figure of age. But look at the age of John from the perspective of a small story. I regularly check the work site kettlerusa.com, buying on it the cheapest product - balls for table tennis. I often forget to cancel my orders, because of what I get a lot of packages with these balls. At the same time, I remember well “Captain Kangaroo”, which was a popular children's TV series from 1955 to the mid-70s. His hero, Captain Kangaroo, was regularly hit by ping-pong balls as a result of his friend’s pranks . Once in a conversation with John, I called my growing stock of ping-pong balls Captain Kangaroo. Naturally, I thought that John watched this show. But when I saw that he was confused by my used name, I described several scenes from films to him. John's answer seemed unexpected: “Don, I grew up when there was no TV yet. It was the beginning of the 50s. ”Yes, John was not only from the era before Node.js, before Ruby, before Java and before the Internet — he was even from the era before TV. And yet there is no better programmer than him - in RPG or the like. Even including proclaiming themselves "smarter" 30-year-olds and younger.
Yes. OK He works with RPG. Want an example where a programmer writes on something different from an "antique" RPG? What about HTML5, JavaScript and C #? Then read my blog about Jim Stanitsky - it was he who introduced me to this area in the early 80s.
20 years of experience against 20 times a year
When I hear someone talking about 20 years of experience, I am curious - this is indeed the case, or in fact it was the 1st year of experience 20 times. I know a lot of developers who used the knowledge gained in the first year of work, then throughout the rest of their careers. I saw this on the IBM AS / 400 RPG market with 40-50 year old people, but I saw the same thing with some 30 year old Java developers. In the early 2000s, I traveled around the country, conducting Java workshops for RPG developers. I expected that these developers know the modern modular programming methods on RPG, but it turned out that most of them still use the old-school RPG methods. They stopped increasing their core skill set - and began to acquire less new ones. Then in 2008-10 I taught Java developers at Circuit City to work with Groovy and Grails. This nation was at the age of about 30, and they were completely satisfied with the good old Java with its “write everything yourself”, “don't be puzzled by frameworks”, etc.
My position, of course, is not to find out that these younger developers were smarter than me or not. The problem is that many programmers allow themselves to freeze. And the main problem is that after performing the same operations ten times over the years, these programmers forget how to learn. Not only can catch-up technology, which is ten years old, be extremely difficult - it can be almost impossible if you forget how to learn.
If you plan to stay in the IT field for more than 10 years, you need to learn all your life. I have always been a lifelong student. I have studied and developed many programming languages, structures and strategies. As a result, I acquired the skills necessary for learning. Case in point: I was told that it was impossible to learn a second language when I was over 50. And now I say to you: this is not true. I started learning Italian when I was 52 years old. Now I read and listen to daily Italian stories and move through the “spoken” language. And as a result, for me to learn another programming language or some kind of structure is a simple matter.
By and large, you only did what you have done in the last 2 years.
Kent Beck suggested that with the sequential use of pair programming, the possibilities of programmers do not differ much after two years of work. It is clear that this operates in an environment where methods and skills can be easily shared. In an environment where knowledge of veterans becomes common. My first reaction when I first heard it a few decades ago was as follows: 1) compare myself and other developers as often as possible in pairs and in another way, and 2) I don’t think that my many years of experience guarantee competitiveness or higher wages.
I often say that I am essentially - just what I have done in the past two years. I could talk about all my work for thirty years, such as, for example, replacing the use of System / 3 punch cards on AS / 400, writing a debugger for Kobol or ... But, I'm afraid you will be bored. I have done something that might interest you only in the last two years. Among them: developing an open source search engine ElasticSearch and learning how to work with it, configuring many applications on OpsWorks AWS, installing Docker for many client applications, translating Rails 2.x applications to Rails 4.2, upgrading Ruby 1.9 to 2.2 and improving Git efficiency and, more precisely, GitHub.
Forget my age. I bet that my list of works for the last two years is at least as good as that of any 20-30 year old. The main question here is: what can I call my achievements in two years, starting from this point in time?
How can a developer draw a “two-year balance”?
Learn, use and learn again
Approach this year as if it were your first year of working as a developer, and learn everything you can. Recover the energy that you had in the first year of programming. Remember that drive when you wanted to prove to yourself and your colleagues that you are “cool” in this IT field. Start reading technical literature again, try new methods and ask colleagues to teach you. Re-experience the excitement of working with other developers to generate new knowledge. Constantly study and research all forms of education, including:
• Podcasts
• I like Greater Than Code and The Bike Shed .
• webcast
• Ruby programmers continue to prefer RailsCasts , and I recently enjoy Ruby Tapas .
• Magazines and newsletters
• I subscribe to the following: InfoQ , Ruby Weekly , DZone Daily Digest .
• I also have a ThoughtWorks Radar subscription to know the most advanced techniques.
• Interactive online courses
• I was a Rails instructor at CareerFoundry , but there are hundreds of options.
• Conferences and seminars
• Try to attend one conference per year. Remember that you can often find out more in the hall of a conference room than by listening to the performances themselves.
• If you are unable to go to a conference, then use the fact that many meetings are available online. I recommend the site confreaks.tv/conferences , which contains meetings of dozens of conferences.
• Blogs
• Track several quality blogs — such as Corgibytes and Giant Robots Smashing on Other Giant Robots — where you can get new posts.
• Regularly run your own blog, post posts. Everyone can offer a solution to problems or can give an approach that will help others. Additionally - writing posts on a blog helps to consolidate knowledge.
Also take the time to understand which type of training is best for you. Do you learn better from books (my case) or do you need an audience? Do you learn better by ear? But, regardless of your style of study, try to learn something new every day.
Lack of employment gives you the opportunity to learn
Lack of work is not an excuse for not trying to deal with new methods and technologies. You do not need to be hired to get experience. Run your own online project. Cloud hosters can be completely or almost free in the absence of many visitors. Get off with some stupid idea and implement it. Put the solution publicly on GitHub so others can see it. Perform a full cycle from the server database and maybe a small NoSQL to a simple front end. Then move this external interface to a one-page application, like Ember or React or Angular. Add a check with card processing.
The following is perhaps an unimportant idea for a startup, but it could give you a real world experience: a virtual lemonade. Create a website where anyone, using the current position of your phone, can see nearby shops with lemonade. This means that you will need to enter the geographic information system (GIS) and the database for such shops. It will be necessary to write server and client programs. Then you will need to ensure that customers can register their shop with your service. Maybe give them a notice about someone who is looking for their shop, so they can answer that they are open. Perhaps you will not become the next Zuckerberg, but you will undoubtedly get the full range of skills in this market.
Stay fit and stay healthy, but don't worry too much about appearance.
I do not think it is necessary - as some employment counselors recommend - to try to look younger by experimenting with hair dye or plastic surgery. But what is required of you is the sensation of your energy. To remain relevant in an industry that seems to be aimed at young people, it is essential to be energetic and active. And overweight 50-year-old wheezing smoker does not give serious reason to expect the manifestation of vitality and energy.
A year or so ago, I conducted a two-week training seminar with about a dozen developers aged about 30 years. The training went on the 22nd floor, and every day, returning from the general dinner, I climbed the stairs. In the first two days, one or two people joined me, but then those who wanted were gone. It will be quite difficult to transfer you to the category of "fulfilled" when you cannot stay close to you.
Do not make excessive efforts just to prove your point. Be yourself. Only - the best part of himself. Fitness can be a simple daily energetic walk. It is possible to put on headphones and listen to some technical podcast on this walk. I watch webcasts while working out on a simulator in a fitness center, and listen to podcasts while rolling on a monocycle. I prefer a day workout: thanks to her, my head clears up in the middle of the day, and I feel refreshed, going back to work in the afternoon.
I do not think that it is necessary to go to any extreme measures to look younger. I could look younger just by shaving off my gray mustache (the hair on my head is still thick and have only a few gray patches). But I deserve this white hair and wrinkles; for me, they are signs of a life-experience. I would like someone to say to me somehow: “Hey, the eighties called, they want to get their mustache back.” “Great,” I would laugh. - "These mustaches deservedly got me from the eighties, so I will not give them up."
Be interesting
It doesn’t matter how old you are, but if you are a lazy guy, then you will be boring in any communication. Be interesting ... for yourself. Everyone gets some pleasure from their hobbies. It does not matter if others think that your hobby or your passion is strange or not quite normal. For example: I hold a bee and ride a one-wheeled bike. I also know the reenactors of the civil war - I would agree to deal with this matter only for a rather big sum, but these people delight me. I’m sure that if you don’t have a hobby, then you have hobbies that haven’t turned into a hobby yet. Having a hobby is essentially a fun form of lifelong learning.
Do not hide your age
I believe that it is necessary to immediately give clear information to potential employers about your age, so that you can immediately weed out employers with age discrimination. In what environment would you like to work: where are they looking at you as a dead weight, or where your energy and experience are valued? Below are the first two sentences from my cover letter to Corgibytes: “Your team is looking for a specialist with“ 7+ years of software development experience ”and“ a Polyglot programmer with 5+ years of experience in programming languages ​​and 2+ in frameworks ”. What do you say about 7+ years of C / C ++, 7+ years of Java, 2+ years of PHP, and then 3+ years of Ruby (not to mention 7+ years of RPG and Cobol, otherwise you can do arithmetic and calculate my age)? ” Thus, I gave ironic information about my age in the first paragraph.
Calmly go to pay cuts for new opportunities.
I went through a significant pay cut three or four times in my career. We are talking about 10-20 thousand dollars a year (10-15%). And this is not because I lost my job. I left the workplace because I did not see for myself the opportunity for professional growth in the position held. I also refused places with high salaries when I felt that they would interfere with my professional development. Some of my transitions to another job turned out to be a bad choice, ending in a dead end, but I’m sure that I always walked away from some project, having gained valuable knowledge in this market.
I have seen that a lot of people focus on some technologies (for example, Lotus Notes and Domino), and after 10 years find out that they are no longer needed in this market. Even if you get a high salary, do not let the technical world pass you by. Be sure that you own the latest technology. And, if you can't do it in your current position, then maybe it's time to move on.
Stay forever young
As I said before, yes, age discrimination is present and very noticeable. Our bodies are aging, and some people — like Zuckerberg, for example — will use it against us. But the biggest mistake would be to agree that our mind and spirit are also aging. Here is where we can stay "young."
Bob Dylan said it best:
"May you do it
build a ladder to the stars
And overcome her every step.
May you stay forever young.
Let you finally grow up
And you will become fair and faithful.
May you always know the truth
And you will see the radiance around you.
May you always be courageous
Strong, with proudly straightened back.
May you stay forever young.
Forever young, forever young,
May you remain forever young. ”
Notice that when Bob Dylan released his 33rd album “Together Through Life”, which became a hit in Britain, he was 68 years old.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/318914/
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