I am not doing software development into my 60’s. I want to get off of the technology treadmill.
RE: I am not doing software development into my 60s. I want to get off of the technology treadmill.
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Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills — such as the latest programming-language fad — or not suitable for entry level. In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesnt leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Employers have admitted this in unguarded moments. Craig Barrett, a former chief executive officer of Intel Corp., famously remarked that the half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years, while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior.
Vivek Wadhwa, a former technology executive and now a business writer and Duke University researcher, wrote that in 2008 David Vaskevitch, then the chief technology officer at Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), acknowledged that the vast majority of new Microsoft employees are young, but said that this is so because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with.
More than a decade ago, Congress commissioned a National Research Council study of the age issue in the profession. The council found that it took 23.4 percent longer for the over-40 workers to find work after losing their jobs, and that they had to take an average pay cut of 13.7 percent on the new job.
Why do the employers prefer to hire the new or recent grads? Is it really because only they have the latest skill sets? That argument doesnt jibe with the fact that young ones learned those modern skills from old guys like me. Instead, the problem is that the 35-year-old programmer has simply priced herself out of the market. As Wadhwa notes, even if the 45-year-old programmer making $120,000 has the right skills, companies would rather hire the younger workers.