<p>I’ve no doubt that some older engineers have trouble finding jobs in this economy. We’ve all heard those stories in the news about engineers with 25 or 30 years of professional experience who have been searching for jobs unsuccessfully for two years or more. Those stories scare me, too. But I have to wonder – how much of that has to do with the cut-throad, “use em and lose em” nature of the tech industry and how much of it has to do with the individuals themselves?</p>
<p>Growing up, my best friend’s dad had some sort of tech job at Boeing. As I got older and started contemplating a career in science and engineering, I began to learn more about what my friend’s dad did for a living. My understanding is that he was a kind of database administrator and he had been maintaining some database of theirs forever (or as long as I had known him, anyway, which was a pretty long time). Years later, after I had started college, I went to visit him at his house and he was excited to show me this new thing that he had been learning – HTML. Now this was probably in the early 2000s so HTML was hardly new by then. Nevertheless, it was the first new thing he had taught himself in a long time and he seemed really jazzed about it. That was when I started to realize that he had become an obsolete engineer. He had been complacent at his boring job for too many years, and now he was excited about learning something that the average 9th grader had long ago mastered. I don’t recall him ever studying or learning anything before then, and when I think back about him, I mostly just remember him sitting on his leather couch for hours on end, watching cable TV (he had like a million channels).</p>
<p>Since I started working in the industry myself, I have seen this complacency repeating itself among my former classmates. I know several guys who work as web programmers at small web companies, still doing the same PHP + Apache that they’ve been doing for the last 5 or 6 years, not learning anything new, not challenging themselves, not keeping up to date with new technologies, and instead, they’re more interested in becoming mini real-estate moguls (like every other delusional Californian). I look at their bookshelves and they hardly have any textbooks or technical books or journals. Sometimes, I get the feeling that they know even less about web technologies than I do (RESTful Web Services? What’s that?) even though I’ve never even worked as a web programmer.</p>
<p>I recall my first interview after I graduated. It was for a “programmer/analyst” position at a company that sold software services to small and medium sized financial institutions. As part of the interview process, I had to sit down and talk with a team of their developers. They were older guys most of whom had been with the company for 15+ years, and they were all really nice guys, but I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t want the job. These guys were basically maintaining old, legacy software written in some archaic language few programmers have ever heard of, and it was an obvious dead end. Part of the job description was fixing bugs in the software, so I asked them what tools they use to identify bugs; if they use a graphical IDE or perhaps a command line debugger like GDB. The response I got was, “uh… well… we just put prints statements in there.” Later, I politely turned down the offer, but I refered a friend of mine who had struggled a lot in school and was having a difficult time finding a job. I figured he could work there for a while until he’s able to land a more interesting job. My friend got the offer and still works there, almost 6 years later. Sometimes, when I see him, I suggest to him that it might be time to start looking for a new job, or at the very least, it might be good for him to start a project of his own outside of work. He always agrees, but to my knowledge, he hasn’t acted on that advice yet. It’s understandable – he gets a steady paycheck every two weeks and he has plenty of spare time to pursue his many hobbies when he’s not working.</p>
<p>Recently, that friend told me about some puzzling drama at the company. Apparently, the leadership expressed interest in moving to a Java platform, but was met with great resistance by the developers. Moving to Java, the developers complained, would force them to learn a whole new language! When I heard this story, I thought it was preposterous. Most software engineers enjoy learning new languages and often do it in their spare time. And besides… who doesn’t know how to program in Java these days? What will happen to these guys if this company ever implodes? Will they be able to find jobs? What company wants to hire a senior engineer and pay a senior engineer’s salary to someone who has been working on non-challenging and outdated stuff for the last 15-20 years? If they’re really lucky, maybe they can find a job at another company doing the exact same thing, but that isn’t likely to happen.</p>
<p>All of us try to get into good schools and earn high marks in order to compete for jobs, but the truth is that it doesn’t stop after graduation (or certification or whatever). I am still fairly early into my career so I admit that I may not know what I’m talking about, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the horror stories you hear about are coming from engineers who were far too complacent for far too long, and as a result, have lost their competitive edge. What will my former classmates do, the webprogrammers who don’t bother to keep up with emerging technologies – in their own domain, no less – if they lose their cushy jobs? Even worse, what will they do if the lose their jobs 10 years from now? I can totally see them being interviewed by a reporter, talking about how they’ve been looking for work for two years with no luck, despite having years of experience.</p>
<p>I’m not making any assumptions about the folks on this thread who have expressed frustration with the job market. Obviously, I don’t know their personal situtations. I’m only expressing my own opinion about some of the things I’ve seen, and there’s a good chance my opinion will change as I get older. Also, I’m mainly talking about software engineers since I know less about what things are like for engineers of other disciplines.</p>