Age Discrimination in IT

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>I know that computer science is supposed to be a career that is in demand with high salaries. Putting aise the competititon from H1B visa holders and outsourcing for a minute, why should anyone pursue a career with substantial age discrimination in it? Now sure, most professions have age discrimination, but it is epsecially bad in software engineering and similar jobs. As I posted earlier, while 52% of civil engineers are employed in civil engineering jobs 20 years after graduating from college, only 19% of CS majors are employed in jobs relating to their major within 20 years. This data comes from Professor Matloff, whom you will hear from shortly.</p>

<p>Now I know most people here are young and don't care about age discrimination. But you will one day become old like it or not. And when your old, your going to have a wife and kids to support, and perhaps a mortage hanging around your neck. So why enter a profession that will unlikely last you until retirement? Believe it or not, but switching career fields when your 40 is no cake walk since you generally have to start at the bottom. </p>

<p>According to Professor Norm Matloff, who has written about age discrimination in IT a lot:</p>

<p>"One of the things I've done in my research on this topic is to compare career longevity of [computer science] grads and civil engineering grads. I found that the [computer science] grads had much shorter careers than the civil engineers, even though the two fields arguably utilize similar skill sets, etc. Why the difference? I've long maintained that IT employers use the alleged fast pace of technological change in IT as an excuse to justify shunning older workers, an excuse that would not fly well in civil engineering.”</p>

<p>Another study found:</p>

<p>"Age and experience, which elsewhere gets people promoted, are no help in the Silicon Valley; on the contrary, there is a distinct bias in favor of youth. For example, a Computerworld study of Information Technology Professionals (ITP) age 30 and older reported that it took them 50% longer than employees younger than 30 to find a job."</p>

<p>Yes</a>, Age Discrimination Is Worse in IT Than in Other Fields | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com</p>

2

<p>The time you spend here bashing CS and Engineering could be used in applying for jobs with your Accounting degree.</p>

<p>You know, my dad got an Accounting degree in 1980. He swept floors for 11 months, but eventually he got an entry-level job as an auditor. 29 years later he was making $300k/year when he got laid off. Instead of whining about it he used his networking skills to get another job. </p>

<p>Most of your sources are blogs and old journal articles. The professional unemployment rate is still very, very low in the U.S.A. If you have reasonably unique job skills that people will pay money for (engineering, accounting, etc.), you need to get out and get yourself a job. You don’t apply into the black hole of the internet with the resume you spent a half hour writing. You write a good resume, you get your work experience and contacts in order, and you get in the car. It’s not hard to ask, “are you hiring?..Can I fill out an application?” </p>

<p>Thomas Edison didn’t whine about a lack of engineering jobs, or the intense competition from Europe…</p>

3

<p>You can never go wrong with STEM.</p>

4

<p>Is a 2006 op-ed a “blog or old journal” article? I mean, have things drastically changed since 2006 to make the piece obsolete?</p>

<p><a href=“http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/SFChron.txt[/url]”>http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/SFChron.txt&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>"It’s not hard to ask, “are you hiring?..Can I fill out an application?” </p>

<p>There are no “applications” for accountants or any field that requires a degree. An application is for applying to a cashier job at Wal Mart. Anytime I ask if someone is hiring, they almost always refer me to their website.</p>

5

<p>I think its kind of funny, because I don’t know ANY IT guys at my company under the age of 30. For that matter, I know a ton of programmers over the age of 30, many of them in management but not all.</p>

<p>I generally distrust any survey about career choices that does not offer an analysis of what the “unemployed” professionals are doing and how much they are making - are they doing better, worse? I have worked with sociologists in the past, and it never ceases to amaze me how often they complete a study only to realize that they did not ask the right questions. </p>

<p>I also distrust comparisons between one field of study only a couple of decades old with one that has been around for centuries. Most of the older programmers I know don’t have degrees in CS or IT because back then hardly anyone did. It is perhaps a little disingenuous to say that programmers over 30 are doomed because of their age, and not because of the steadily improving degree of training made available over the past decades.</p>

<p>Dammit - I’m arguning with Homer again, aren’t I? Aw, never mind…</p>

6

<p>The salaries confirm that the demand is there alchemist. Where you can go wrong is if you get a good degree like Homer28 did but not put yourself out there. </p>

<p>You know why some people with engineering degrees can’t get jobs Homer? It’s because they sit at home on the computer whining on Facebook about how they haven’t been given the job they’re entitled to. These are not the people that put the suit on at 8AM and drive around to places until 5PM introducing themselves and dropping off resumes.</p>

<p>Sometimes, it’s not the degree, it’s how you use it.</p>

7

<p>Age discrimination is rampant in the technology industry, according to a new study, and the phenomenon hurts both old and young workers. </p>

<p>[Tech</a> ageism works both ways - CNET News](<a href=“http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-256256.html&tag=mncol%3Btxt]Tech”>Tech ageism works both ways - CNET)</p>

8

<p>That’s all just whining.</p>

9

<p>@ Homer</p>

<p>The article you linked to was written almost 10 years ago!</p>

<p>ROFL</p>

10

<p>■■■■■ dude Homer28 must be ****ing insane, if he is an accounting major why does he care?</p>

<p>Every article he links is from right after the dot com bubble crashed. IMO he is just an IT worker trying to scare young college students away from the field to secure his job and salary. Funny enough I know plenty of CS students who do the same to incoming freshmen.</p>

11

<p>While Homer28 may be trollishly blunt, (s)he has raised various valid points, or at the very least, valid questions that must be asked and debated.</p>

<p>In fields where the knowledge/technology is in constant flux, those individuals possessing the latest knowledge/technological skills will out-compete the rest. In the CS field, the knowledge/technology keeps changing rapidly, and that tends to favor younger individuals who are exposed to the change and command lower salaries. Older workers are capable of adapting, but generally, these older workers command higher salaries; from a business standpoint, the company saves $ by hiring the young kid and laying off the older worker.</p>

<p>Have you ever heard of significant age discrimination in Law, Physics, Medicine, or Economics? Of course not, because in these fields accumulated experience trumps new knowledge/technology and in the cases of Law, Physics, and Medicine, barriers have been “erected” to protect those at the top.</p>

12

<p>That may be true in IT, by programming experience is programming experience…there may be different and newer languages to learn but the theory behind all of your work remains the same.</p>

13

<p>Two of the most important areas for I.T. firms are networks and databases. If you do a survey of most undergrad CS programs, the computer networks course and the database course are usually electives. If you survey the I.T. firms especially the defense firms support federal INTEL, most database professionals are oldheads like myself.</p>

<p>I am currently on a project now where there are 3 oldheads (including myself) and a bunch of young object-oriented programmers who know very little and don’t care to learn more about databases. I am fine with that. It keeps me working.</p>

14

<p>My undergraduate degree is in accounting. During my college years, I needed to fulfill the foreign language gen eds. At the time, which I still think is hillarious, programming languages counted towards fulfilling that req. I took advantage of that loophole to avoid spanish, which I didn’t like, and used that education to get a job working with the university’s central IT administration to help pay for college. My first programs were a series of 80 column cards (thousands of them) arranged in order in a box. I moved from writing CoBOL programs against flat files on an IBM 360 mainframe through ISAM, VSAM, IMS, DB2 and Oracle. </p>

<p>After 30 years in the business, I’m a Senior Oracle Database Admin and Web Architect who works with people fresh out of college. They bring enthusiasm to the job and are very bright, but learning the latest and greatest doesn’t prepare you very well to hit the ground running in Enterprise IT, and companies know they can’t rely on only inexperienced college grads to keep their enterprise applications up and running. They need experienced professionals to corral, tutor and direct the more unexperienced among them. I’m not a manager, per se, I’ve stayed technical, and staying on top of the game requires that you seek active training and professional education experiences throughout your career. Institutional knowledge and experience in shepherding applications from the conceptual phase through implementation and maintenance is critical in shaping how you use those skills you acquired in college. While there is always a bias in business towards cutting costs, most instances of attempting to cut costs in IT are penny-wise and pound foolish. The skills needed to explain that fact to management are as critical to you in your career as is knowledge of say, Java, and arguably much more important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used Bob Martin’s mantra in explaining to management certain salient facts about success in IT, or in any other technical endeavour.</p>

<p>Good, Fast, Cheap, Done…Pick any three, and get back to me. You can have it good, fast and cheap, but it won’t get done. You can have it good, fast and done, but it won’t be cheap. You also can have it good, cheap, and done, but it definitely won’t be fast.</p>

<p>In summary, while there’s bias in all employment towards holding down costs, smart, efficient businesses recognize the value of having both experienced and lower cost inexperienced employees in the mix of whatever is being accomplished. Bottom line is do what you love to do, then figure out how to make money at it, then figure out how to balance work and all that money you’re making with your personal life.</p>

<p>Attempting to make a point about whether it’s beneficial to get into one profession or another based on opinion expressed in a particular article or articles is a waste of time. And let me offer this to Homer. The reason you don’t have a job most likely is much more attributable to your bad attitude than an H1B visa-holder IMHO. Quit wasting your time and the time of others by being so negative, and get out there and sell yourself.</p>

15

<p>

</p>

<p>Well, that’s untrue.</p>

16

<p>Thanks Balthezar,</p>

<p>Just this second, I was explaining to the young Java developers the concepts of users, schemas and tablespaces. These young developers have brilliant minds and create object class after object class BUT they seem so lost when it comes to database schemas, tablespaces, users and roles.</p>

<p>Like I said earlier…hey, it keeps the checks coming for me.</p>

17

<p>Oh I get the same thing Global. They teach me about encapsulation and instantiation, and I nod my head and say very interesting…Then I pull the plug on their workstation and say where’s your object now? Then, I begin to tell them about databases…It’s not what you know, it’s knowing there’s a lot you don’t know that’s the key.</p>

18

<p>My son had a database research internship over the summer so I got him a copy of the Stonebraker book. Unfortunately the latest edition removed some of the historical papers back in the System R/Jim Gray days but those are available online. I showed him some stuff on CODASYL models too - real stoneage stuff but these are the roots of modern day databases and some of the old ideas have made a comeback.</p>

19

<p>ok, here’s an article from 2010:</p>

<p>[The</a> painful truth about age discrimination in tech | Adventures in IT - InfoWorld](<a href=“http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/painful-truth-about-age-discrimination-in-tech-209]The”>The painful truth about age discrimination in tech | InfoWorld)</p>

20

<p>Here’s the conclusion at the end of your article. A resounding perhaps.</p>

<p>“So is there an age discrimination problem in IT? Perhaps – in the same way there’s an age discrimination problem in professional sports, journalism, and the arts. At some point in those career arcs, the assets that made workers such hot properties – youth, the ability to devote lots of time to their vocation, comparative inexperience – diminish. And the marginal utility of what’s left – experience – is not as strongly valued.”</p>

<p>One major problem that I see in the articles which you posted is how you mix CS and IT jobs in there. I would expect CS majors to go into software engineering or computer science. The articles that you’ve posted seem to lump everything into IT which is quite a wide variety of jobs, skill sets and skill levels.</p>