I rarely find people working in IT company, who is older than 40 years old. How do you secure your future, Sup Forums?

I rarely find people working in IT company, who is older than 40 years old. How do you secure your future, Sup Forums?

I am working for my governments ministry of finance and with 25 I am one of the youngest guys in the whole house.
They all work on PL/I programms, in 800x600 terminals.
In a few centuries I will probably maintain the current Java applications.

I worked my company's booth at regional IT trade shows.

70% of the guys there look like the man in pic related.

They are just soulless middle aged men who are happy to collect a 75K paycheck and go home and watch Big Bang theory on their 400 channel cable TV plan and maybe take their overweight family out to Starbucks or Outback on weekends.

The attractive people who are actually engaged in living a balanced life usually end up in sales eventually (sometimes management).

i had to recommend my company fire a 60 year old dude who was undergoing QA training. Still feel kinda bad about that, but shit happens

Sounds like a good life to me.

The oldest developer/architect is my company is over 50 and he still do give a fuck about the job.

I Work with people of all ages, average age 35-40, No wagecucks or Code Monkeys either. Feels good to Work for a company which cares about its employees

Why do you have to poke fun at this family?

Try working in Cobol.

You just described 2/3rd's of my co-workers.

A lot of them are very comfy with only one or two pieces of software as well. Like, you mention anything besides Microsoft Exchange Server to them and they do not have a clue what you are talking about.

I am glad that PowerShell is becoming more commonplace now, it's filtering out a lot of these glorified UI Clickers that have been cruising through the IT world without a challenge for 15+ years.

>have neighbour that always helped me with my PC
>he is 50 now and they fired his entire department a few months ago, because not profitable enough
>he is now desperate for a job, but can't find anything despite being experienced and in shape physically

That shit hurts man. But in the future IT is better then manufacturing, given the rise of robotics. I'm not gonna lie, the future is bleak if you can't maipulate a system so only you can fix it.

IT future is bleak, think about all of the tasks that have been automated since 10 years ago (2007). I think there will always be room for desktop support, just because you have to fix problems like an idiot who didn't plug in their keyboard or something. However, days of having a NOC full of sysadmins are coming to an end shortly.

I run a business of teaching old people how to computer. The problem I usually see is that the generational gap makes the communication seem like something foreign to them but it's not so much that they don't know how to. I realized this when I got some of the few really old people that were good with computers to explain to their peers. They got how to do things much faster that way.

I'm 45 and I'm still in IT. It's a young man's game. You have to take care of yourself and staying marketable requires ongoing, honest self-appraisal and effort.

Any advice for a 30 year old woman who is tired of her shit job and wants to attend open university to work with computers?
Please I know you're hesitant to give advice especially to women but I wonder if anyone could give advice as to the best degree for me considering age and that I work
In the UK if that matters

Jobs - in general, not just IT - seem to be moving towards a model where you can never get comfortable, you have to be continually learning new things and fighting to stay abreast of new trends in whatever your field is. You never have a "secure" job in the sense that the boomers did, where once you had it you were assured of keeping it pretty much indefinitely so long as you were something vaguely resembling competent.

what I wonder about is the societal implications of this, since there's a whole lot of people in the workforce who very much don't want to learn new things and stay marketable, they want to solve the problem once and then coast until retirement. I bet we'll be seeing a lot of 40somethings who've become essentially unemployable pretty soon.

L O N D O N

You need to be honest with yourself. IT is predominantly men - not because there is sexism (I've been in the interviewer's chair for many years, could give a shit whether male or female), but because men and women make different choices.

IT is a way of life, and many IT jobs demand more of employees than women want to give. Work-life balance is not in the cards. If that isn't for you, you need to examine whether or not IT is for you. It's possible to have an IT job and work-life balance - but not typical.

Fuck you toasty roasty.

If she can become an engineer, so you can you

what is an interaction engineer?

I think to keep up would require self improvement and self teaching to learn and be able to use the new tech. As you get older and get a family and all that obviously you will not have the energy and time to work as a young guy. I think the only safe way to guarantee long term stability is to move to management and ownership. Even specialists can easily become obsolete and be replaced by younger competitors.

Yes not many old people work in the IT industry, but you also need to ask, where have they gone? Are they now on food stamp and are they working with their portfolio in the Bahamas? When you make money obviously you need to invest and plan for yourself.

>30 years
My buddy, you have problem. Better go to university, will be get a job in the government.
What is a open university?

customer service for designers

An engineer that engineers interactions.

Wrong,
If you create something that only you understand.
Example - Shitty code, non standard formats, no comments ect.
and you are the only who can upkeep it and wont teach other people. from doing this you might be keeping your job and maybe higher pay as only you know it. You will probably be replaced, the program will be rewritten by a group of people who can all help with upkeep.

some go to management, some become freelancers, some give up and try to become professional poker players.

if you never came across old timers in IT, you have not been in many companies.

My job for the past two years as a consultant has literally been to find ways to throw away those systems (and their creators).

Yeah, but that's because of the lower costs of virtualization.

Hilariously enough, this means that we might end up just buying a big box from IBM and have it virtualize 400 or so servers, desktops and what have you for us.

Need a test-machine? Just emulate x86 and get a Windows thing for integration tests.

Not that you necessarily need to test on Windows, since the normies don't really use computers anymore, and those who do prefer Apple.

You may just end up seeing something ala JuJu being used to deploy applications, and just not bother with the details until you need to.

It's funny how right proper fucked Microsoft is long term.

The desktop as a mass consumer product is dead, and they killed it in order to sell xboxes. The average joe uses a tablet for day to day surfing, and don't need anything fancy. The on-the-go professional is going to use Apple or Lenovo (although a couple of years ago everyone had HP probooks), and Lenovo isn't that much cheaper than Apple.

So what was once a market where microsoft had over 90% dominance (the desktop) is now splintered into console gaming, laptops, and tablets.

And MS isn't winning in any of them. What they do have left though is legacy support for MS SQL Server based applications (wow! it can talk to Excel! And it's cheaper than Oracle! Which is like being cleaner than a designated Indian street, but I digress.

There's also Office, but people don't really need most of Office. There are business people who use Excel to great effect (remember that guy who did sum(a1:a50) instead of mean(a1:a50) and thus created the credit crisis of 2008? Couldn't have happened without MS Excel.)

Word? You really think GoogleDocs isn't good enough for the 99%? Excel? It's mostly used for making lists and setting up weekly schedules and so on. The mathematical powers of the thing is grossly underutilized.

They are so long term fucked.

write barely passable code with 0 comments in critical parts of the codebase so you'll be the only one that can maintain it

Sounds like UX but without the label so actual UX experts won't mock her for being shit at it.

Interestingly enough there are quite a few women who does UX stuff, and are quite good at it. It's the type of IT job that women like.

>How do you secure your future, Sup Forums?- 28 posts and 2 image replies shown.
>not doing machine learning in IBM 360 assembly

Mostly online university in the UK, but the degree is absolutely valid unlike the for profit online sold in the US

What computer related field would you recommend? I'm sick of this supermarket job

Depends what you wanna do?

Like most jobs experience is always key, degrees are a bit of a mixed bag as people usually go for Computer Science which isn't strictly IT and programming shit. If you did want to do school see if you can something which earns you certifications, otherwise see if you can bullshit your way into a job and get in that way.

Dad's 52 years old. He got into IT work in the 90s after abandoning his position as a corporate salesman (a dumb move if you ask me) and moving to America.
Started out by getting certs for programming, I think he learned C++.
It was pretty easy for him to get a job until about 2007-2009. He's since settled down at a job and he's been going steady.
I can tell that he struggles to keep in touch with his coworkers though.
He forces himself to watch The Big Bang Theory when he would rather be watching Seinfeld, and he always complains about how it's getting harder and harder to talk to the 20/30somethings that he works with.
The best way to keep yourself employable is to keep up with new technologies and to work jobs that use those technologies. He goes on the company sponsored conference trips as often as he can.

You clearly put a lot of effort into this post, and yet nothing you say is even remotely recognizable as factually accurate to someone who has been working in the industry for over 10 years.

By working for your freedom. Join with me, at gnu.org today!

You don't need money for your future. We can all count on society.

TrueGNU~
>Skype-- No way! That's proprietary!

I'm a 30-something in IT and I find it hard to talk to most 20/30-somethings.

Not sure yet. Something with a decent salary of at least 30K

>degree is absolutely valid

Sure you can say you have a degree. Most employers will chuck it out of the window though.

Don't bother with that, if you want to get into IT teach yourself sysadmin stuff and do some certifications.

I wouldn't try to approach a dev role as they normally like somebody with a top stem education

I agree, we are moving much faster as a society overall, constantly advancing and making last knowledge basically obsolete.

I predict the future of employment will depend on your ability to learn new things, and quickly (as opposed to proving what you already know).

F off Sup Forums

I can advise you of a job to be my gf, I live in Bristol too which is way better than London

Everyone over 40 has already retired on their cushy IT money

i do software consulting where everybody's in it for the money. plenty of old folks supporting their kids as they go through college in that line of work, plus the knowledge builts on itself.

Of course, virtualization is awesome.

>this means that we might end up just buying a big box from IBM and have it virtualize 400 or so servers, desktops and what have you for us.

If you think about it, that is pretty much what AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. already do except it's all in the "cloud" (stupid fucking term).

>And MS isn't winning in any of them.

Yes, Microsoft is pretty fucked. That being said, hosted O365/Exchange for $10/month per user or whatever is making most MSP's shit their pants. That means Joe the Plumber that owns a company of 50 employees can pay $500/month for all the office software, email hosting, onedrive, etc. and it just plain works. His previous MSP charged thousands per month for less features more then likely. Sure it's botnet but he does not give a fuck since it saves him money, and that right there just killed 1 or possible 2 IT positions.

my dad's over 50 and owns an IT company, most of the company is over 40.

>Hilariously enough, this means that we might end up just buying a big box from IBM and have it virtualize 400 or so servers, desktops and what have you for us.

IBM ain't selling shit in that department.

You want to go with POWER hardware and pay out the ass, IBM will gladly do it and sell you consultants.

Want to buy x86_64 hardware for a tenth the price? IBM will point you towards a hardware partner and sell you consulting on your hardware choice + setup + install + etc at your choice, but definitely not the hardware as that industry is cutthroat.

I find it the exact opposite. Ive rarely met someone under 38 who is in IT.

If people are still running fucking java on standardized hardware configurations in 20 years ill do you a huge favor and kill everyone

I regret to inform you that your opinions are dogshit.

If i ever find myself in a spot where a large company won't hire me due to age related concerns i'll just go freelance. On the internet nobody knows you're a doggo.

Dad's 62, he was one of the first people in the UK to implement Oracle databases. He learnt COBOL at his first job.

He 'retired' at 60, now does contracting as an Enterprise Architect and picks and chooses what projects or companies he works for. The trick is to keep up to date, he's learnt about AWS and the cloud meme which appeals to modern businesses.

Contract this to my work, I'm in IT Change Management and see guys my dads age plodding along on the Service Desk struggling with stuff like Google Mail and AODocs.

What do you consider an acceptable lifestyle? Be honest. How many hours per week, maximum? Work late? Work weekends? Travel? Pressure, getting yelled at when things stop working?

Learn obscure shit.

But java runs anywhere la

Normal 9-5, don't want to work all week nonstop. I do want a husband and kids, surely there's something for me computer related, I see all kinds of very dumb girls with great hr jobs/computer jobs
My current job doesn't pay well and is too physically demanding, 10pm-8am

Saving money to buy some land and properties in thirties and what's left of my twenties.

>Do you know what they do with engineers when they turn 50?
>They take them out back and shoot them.

At my company's local office we have a bunch of greybeards working in high ranking engineering positions. They're all very knowledgeable and do some pretty interesting work.

Good hiring managers root out sexism from the get-go.

I work with three amazing female IT professionals, but holy fuck IT sexism is absolutely real. They'll have a call with a vendor, and basically be told that they have no idea what they're talking about - and so Ill get on the phone and say the exact same thing, and they're all in agreement at my IT knowledge and prowess.

The fuck do you live where 75k is somehow below the standard of average?

You described someone making 40k where I am.

>being this butt devastated by the truth

Chill out nerd, he didn't say below the average... 75k after 20 years is mediocre

why is that? they keep on blabbering nonsense shit and talk fast?

They're "bros".

Degree is nice because you won't be stuck on the low pay grade, lots of companies want you to get a degree or cert to get paid more, if you don't have a degree getting promotion might be a lot harder ( this all depend on where you work and what company rules are )

i really have no issues with old people as long as theyre competent. but lately im forced to work with 40-60 year olds and all they do is complain

>my computer is slow for some reason
>my Excel/Outlook is crashing
>how do I access "Google e-mail" from home?
>VPN doesn't work, help!
>my X third-party, propriety, legacy, industry, specific software isn't working. fix it!
>hey, update my windows to 10. shall we say after 6pm on Friday? ;)
>i hate windows 10. revert me back to 7. this is urgent!

How to cope? Is there any way out of this IT hell Sup Forums?
Every email, every incoming gives me a tiny stroke.

I've been doing this "IT" bullshit for 10 years.
One of my clients actually meets up with me JUST to drink all day.

Drinking and sharing stories like a vet is a nice coping mechanism

then you obviously just spend your time here instead of being in the real world

Holy shit this is spot on with most all 40-50 something IT people at my work (IT for a LARGE retail company)

I'm not saying my life is exactly exciting, but I do get out and do shit, travel a bit, and have hobbies that push me physically.

Sounds like she decides what group activites the people are the retirement community will be forced to sit through today.

So do most young people your age that make enough to do those things.

I wouldn't shit on 40-50-somethings until you actually become one. These people are generally just trying to live comfortable lives with their families. When you're young and have few responsibilities of course you're going to try to move up and experience as many things as you can. Once you get their age, you'll lose a lot of that desire.

>How do you secure your future, Sup Forums?
I don't. Older I am, the more I know I will just either shoot myself once too old and/or too poor or preferably leave the society to live in some shitty third-world country and die in 50 from the tooth infection.

Fair enough. I already know the beginning of that energy loss.

I suppose I have a hard time not comparing the 50 something guys in IT to my old man who did construction all his life. He worked himself to the bone, but even at his age, he gets out and sees the world, even if its at a much slower pace then he once did.
I suppose I just fear getting off of work one day and spending all of my "free" time recharging.

I think the main, if not the only reason, is pretty simple. Most technology advances at an exponential rate, which also applies to automation. Therefore, the rate at which jobs get automated (and new, higher skilled jobs get created), is increasing as well. The lifespan of the average career seems to be getting shorter.
This is why I believe that a lot of people in the next few decades will be unemployed; due to the fact that they either can't (or don't want to) keep up with learning more advanced skills.

At least he's happy and doing what he loves.
You should kill yourself already because you'll never procreate.

ever heard of this concept called "saving"?

>You could have been a firefighter or a sailor or a lumberjack but instead you wasted your life on IT

Which IT are you referring to?

is it:
>"My google chrome is running too slow" IT
or
>"MAB isn't authenticating devices and about 4 core node chassis's were reloaded with the latest ios and they aren't coming back up." IT
?

>Normal 9-5, don't want to work all week nonstop.
Anything above tech support is not for you in IT. I'm not just trying to be shitty to you, anything important means you're technically on call at any time for when things go to shit.

HR/IT, or HR? HR is another animal entirely. Sure, the work-life "balance" is great, but you'll be compensated accordingly.

You might be able to find some "design" or UI kind of job if you're artsy and "passionate". Those jobs are few and far in between, and rarely pay anywhere near what people who have heavy responsibilities and stress make.

Choices have consequences. If you want to make good money, you have to bust your ass.

t. guy who busted his ass for decades.

My point was that the male/female composition of the workforce in IT is not a result of sexism.

Women want IT money, but don't want the IT yolk around their necks with stress, travelling, very late nights and weekends, being on-call, and all that shit.

Just like OP, they want family and "balance", and for most, that comes at a price.

>he still do give a fuck about the job.
oh do he now?

Well I don't know about you fucks, but I've decided to take the professor route. Survive long enough to get tenure, and you don't have to worry about losing your job.

This, these are boomers who started at 40k and then sat and the same desk for 25 years so they are 75k now just because they've mastered one outdated piece of software.

>I am so obsessed with the weight of other people that I construct elaborate lies just to whine about fat people
You're a pathetic person.

Jesus this is so true. If you go to vmworld this is every white guy over 40.

But there are others. Ive been to many Devops focused conferences and there are a lot of serious neckbeards. One there was this late 40s nexkbeard from Cern, like you don't see these kinds of neckbeards outside of acedemia, so they're set for life.

Anyway op, you gotta keep moving into better roles at better companies. If you want to do management you can do that anywhere until you retire. If not, and I certainly don't want to do people management, but then eventually get a job at a large tech company and you can stay in engineering roles and make just as much. I'm 36, make 130k in the Midwest working remotely for a large software company. Not sure what I'm going to do for another 30 years. There aren't many pay grades above so I'm going to max out probably around 160k. That'll be enough to get me to retirement, but wtf do I do for 30 more years? Everything I know and do will be obsolete in 10 years or less, you just have to keep learning new things.

I changed jobs and suddenly work for a company where the average age must be 55+. I feel completely out of place but these old farts know what they're doing still. Company is a small MSP though, not development.

I sock away half of my paycheck because I fear that I'll age out of tech in another 10 years. What I really want to do is buy a few acres and just put a trailer on it and shit post online for the rest of my life. DESU It wouldn't even cost that much to do that

>. What I really want to do is buy a few acres and just put a trailer on it and shit post online for the rest of my life.

You don't need to work in IT for 10 years to shitpost the rest of your life. Just look at my cousin, he's broke and lives in a welfare friendly state. He doesn't do shit.

My last job was at a big data company in silicon valley and I was the youngest person by a really wide margin at 34, I currently work in the IT department of a local government and I am again the youngest by a wide margin at 35.

>if you want to make good money, you have to bust your ass.
If only this was true, while busting your ass might help, it's neither a guarantee nor a requirement for making loadsemone.

>keep learning new things
yep, this is basically the key to IT, software etc

By the time you hit 40s at the latest you should either be starting your own company, independent consulting because you're a knowledge god, or firmly entrenched in middle management at a company that isn't going anywhere. Age discrimination is definitely real, anyone over 30 needs to cultivate godlike skills or else companies will opt for recent college grads over you 10/10 times (because they can trick them into thousands of hours of unpaid overtime)

>let's see where you in 20 years

I know every tech nerd thinks they are going to go on to found a consulting firm and make six to seven digits without the slightest issue, but the fact of the matter is for everyone who makes it there you don't hear about the eight who failed miserably and the one guy that shot himself.

There is nothing wrong with making 75k a year.

This is the truth. Throughout my career I've have moved beyond my peers to bigger and better things and most of them are back still doing the same thing they were doing 10 years ago. People get comfortable with their status quo and either don't have the motivation to change it or they have already reached their max potential, probably a bit of both. I'm at a place now where I'm making well over 100k and I think I don't have it in me to push beyond this level.

>that old guy
Genetic trash, shouldn't be allowed to breed.

>UX
>IT

ok

I've found that working in IT gives me much more freedom.

If you are good at your job, things run smoothly more than 95% of the time, so basically during that time, you can time shift the rest of your work, so you can skip a day, work at night, work from home, or just answer e-mails via cell phone while picking up your kid, going to the doctor, shit like that.

Yeah, there is the 5% of the time that life fucking sucks, but if you aren't raising a kid alone, it's no big deal.