Re: Mid-40s developer

Gbenga wrote:

John <John_NoMail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Occasionally, one of my several (younger) relatives come to me
seeking help in landing a job, and at the same time wonder how I am
still a developer at 45! (As if it's a major failure!).
I simply tell them how I have been refusing promotions and how much
I love designing and developing software, hands on.
Thanks,
John

I wonder this thing about over 40's. I just turned 50, and I
have been programming since 1990. I did code in Cobol. Yep,
Cobol; it works. I also did a lot of programming using
Digital Command Language (DCL). Then, C, C++ (for about
a year; thus, I cannot say I'm great), VB, Delphi, C#, etc. I
just changed into DBA (SQL Server), about a year ago,
and I'm enjoying it very much. My programming skills paid off
like hell.

Now the question is, does age discrimination apply to
other professions like medicine? I guess a medical doctor at
50 is a failure!

Well that depends, is he still using blood-letting or using more
"modern" technics like using leeches to cure a patient? <g>

To me, as long as you are in programming, older age can be an
advantage, predicated on experience of course!

Although I'm still a "youngster", but do have the advance of low-level
micro controller programming (in HEX, no asm), I still outsmart "these
script kiddies" at debugging code as soon as it gets a bit more
complicated (multi-threading for instance).

One thing I missed in this discussion is involvement, you can do your
job from "9-to-5" and can do it "good enough", but do you know what
you're doing, do you know what *your* "customers" want?

If you want to be acknowledged, then don't just do your job, but
think/do beyond that. In school, it might have been enough to get a six
or seven (D/C?) to pass the exam, but in this business (at least in the
business I am in) aim for a 10 (A/A+?) if you want to be taken
seriously. When you're doing that right, you might be getting the same
amount of money (or more) as the poor sucker who's trying to manage you
;-)

--
Pieter
.

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