After the age of 40, is the programmer really desperate?

1506 focus on "lab building" and share a project tutorial every day

Age discrimination is particularly evident in this line.

Text total: 1506 words

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Age discrimination is a professional problem in the software development industry.

is software development A ' dead end ' job?

Should we turn our career planning into a management position?

All of these questions are answered in Quora, so let's summarize them briefly.

As far as age discrimination is concerned, I do not think anyone can deny that there is a certain degree of age discrimination in the industry. From the hiring of new employees in most Silicon Valley companies, the median age of employment is below 30 years. However, this is not a corporate policy issue-it does not employ people over a certain age, and it is an objective phenomenon to have a specific preference for candidates of race, gender or other characteristics.

There are many reasons for age discrimination in the technology industry. First, many companies have found that hiring newly-graduated college students (from MIT, Stanford and other prestigious schools) is the easiest way to recruit new graduates, "cheap" and "quality" is not low. Until then, they are not affected by the experience of any other company, like a whiteboard with a possibility. It is easy for them to spread their corporate culture, software methods and practical experience, and fresh graduates can better accept and digest them.

But at the same time, if you are a candidate with 3 years of solid programming experience (perhaps plus a prestigious aura), no one will say you are not a good candidate, and you may actually be a better choice. Having strong professional skills is certainly a good thing, and when the candidate's other conditions are similar, the relevance of your skills to the business becomes even more important.

Some say "technology is changing too quickly, engineers may not be able to keep pace", which may have been true, but the core technology needed to build a network has been around for decades. The C language appeared as early as the late 1970s, and it has been more than 40 years since. Even Java has been born for more than 20 years (the first time in 1997). This means that there are some engineers who are all the way to witness the industry move forward today, and they may already be nearing retirement age, while their entire career has been focused on C-voice and running UNIX servers for decades or even decades. It is very rare to look at this highly experienced "high-quality" engineer, and I believe no one will claim to be inferior to a 22-year-old college student who has just graduated.

On the other hand, I never thought of software engineering as a "dead end" career. Indeed, after strong pay increases, it tends to stabilize gradually. Part of the reason may be that engineers are essentially a "commodity" of humans. Unless you are a very special engineer, you can always be replaced by others. Compared with other competitive industries, this substitution makes the software engineering industry pay a bit less. However, it is still guaranteed that software engineers are still in short supply, so you can always find a job.

Finally, taking the "management direction" is not a better choice. The author asks, why only consider this one option. There are many alternative career paths, and switching to another engineering or other field is an option. For example, many software engineers who do not like product development turn to operations to do product management, project management, or to lower technical requirements, such as sales or administration, and even some completely changed careers of friends, into the university began an education career.

Finally, the author of Software development engineers said in earnest: "Do not start from the beginning to the direction of career management." No one hires a gardener to build skyscrapers, and no one wants to hire an engineer manager who doesn't code.

Compiled group. Editor: Shangpeng Cheng

Translator: Lin San

Source: 36 Krypton

Link: https://36kr.com/p/5121168.html
Learn MORE:

Award-winning building +"python actual combat", "linux and DevOps combat" is the preferential registration-

Experimental building CEO, CTO, senior Engineer in person, through live broadcast, video broadcast, whole course TA, job challenges and so on, take you 12 weeks to get through Python, Linux, the second two veins, become a real working ability of it engineers.

Click on the link below for more information:

Metamorphosis 2018, Floor + python combat • 6th time Limited Offer ...

Three months to build the Almighty Linux operation and maintenance engineers--"linux and DevOps Combat"