<story><title>How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05847</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wittyreference</author><text>As a physician, I attend conferences, subscribe to online references, question banks, various journals, take ongoing CME, repeat licensing exams, and spend the equivalent of one workday a week reading those new materials, and try to spend a couple hours refreshing myself on materials outside of my specialty. This amounts to an extra un-reimbursed workday a week, and several thousand dollars a year.&lt;p&gt;When I worked in a place that offered CME&amp;#x2F;conference reimbursement, it covered about 1-2K a year, depending on budgeting issues. In my current place, and for all independent or small practice physicians, that comes out of your own pocket.&lt;p&gt;This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn’t mind if it was at least partially reimbursed though. It’s an enormous chunk of change, and not for my benefit.</text></item><item><author>ChuckNorris89</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I&amp;#x27;m doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s the problem with software engineering vs other white collar careers. For example, my accountant friend is expected to be trained by their employer in the latest accounting practices and law frameworks and does&amp;#x27;t devote 1-3 months per year of their personal time on open source accounting projects to learn the latest legal framework for fun, that would be crazy for him. Same for my friends in architecture, dentistry and law. Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm.&lt;p&gt;Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job for the future language&amp;#x2F;framework they will plan to use and instead seek to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone already experienced in the needed stack then repeat the cycle several years&amp;#x2F;decades down the road.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why here you&amp;#x27;re expected to transition to management as a career progression, as IC roles are not really valued at old age unless you&amp;#x27;ve dedicated your free time to coding and I don&amp;#x27;t know about you guys, but I&amp;#x27;d prefer to spend my free time with my kids and exercising outdoors instead of coding to make myself employable in the latest stack.</text></item><item><author>woofie11</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked with two types of older engineers:&lt;p&gt;1) Ones who keep up their skills&lt;p&gt;2) Ones who don&amp;#x27;t&lt;p&gt;The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They&amp;#x27;ve hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they&amp;#x27;re now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They&amp;#x27;ve gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They&amp;#x27;ve written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs.&lt;p&gt;The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They&amp;#x27;re working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can&amp;#x27;t find a new job when that&amp;#x27;s upgraded and they&amp;#x27;re downsized.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They&amp;#x27;re very different crowds, and in very different types of companies.&lt;p&gt;My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I&amp;#x27;m doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That&amp;#x27;s what works for me. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmiller2</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s quite a workload you&amp;#x27;ve set for yourself.  I honestly don&amp;#x27;t know how my doctors do even the basic stuff I see them do, like seeing patients and charting.  When you have to see 4+ patients in an hour (this is too many!), it would seem to me that charting would be one of the things that ends up going out the window.&lt;p&gt;I also find it interesting that you go so far as to repeat your licensing exams.  Is this common among physicians as a whole?  Having known a couple of med students personally, these exams were usually seen as a hurdle to be overcome and a source of stress, but, I suppose it might get easier after a few years of practice.  On a related note, I find it hard to imagine that, say, lawyers would routinely re-sit the bar exam for funsies.&lt;p&gt;Regarding CME, isn&amp;#x27;t that required to maintain licensure?  Or, are you talking about courses above and beyond the minimum to keep your license?&lt;p&gt;And, BTW, I don&amp;#x27;t know who you are, where you practice, or even what your specialty is, but you sound like the kind of person I&amp;#x27;d like to have be my doctor.</text></comment>
<story><title>How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05847</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wittyreference</author><text>As a physician, I attend conferences, subscribe to online references, question banks, various journals, take ongoing CME, repeat licensing exams, and spend the equivalent of one workday a week reading those new materials, and try to spend a couple hours refreshing myself on materials outside of my specialty. This amounts to an extra un-reimbursed workday a week, and several thousand dollars a year.&lt;p&gt;When I worked in a place that offered CME&amp;#x2F;conference reimbursement, it covered about 1-2K a year, depending on budgeting issues. In my current place, and for all independent or small practice physicians, that comes out of your own pocket.&lt;p&gt;This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn’t mind if it was at least partially reimbursed though. It’s an enormous chunk of change, and not for my benefit.</text></item><item><author>ChuckNorris89</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I&amp;#x27;m doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s the problem with software engineering vs other white collar careers. For example, my accountant friend is expected to be trained by their employer in the latest accounting practices and law frameworks and does&amp;#x27;t devote 1-3 months per year of their personal time on open source accounting projects to learn the latest legal framework for fun, that would be crazy for him. Same for my friends in architecture, dentistry and law. Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm.&lt;p&gt;Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job for the future language&amp;#x2F;framework they will plan to use and instead seek to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone already experienced in the needed stack then repeat the cycle several years&amp;#x2F;decades down the road.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why here you&amp;#x27;re expected to transition to management as a career progression, as IC roles are not really valued at old age unless you&amp;#x27;ve dedicated your free time to coding and I don&amp;#x27;t know about you guys, but I&amp;#x27;d prefer to spend my free time with my kids and exercising outdoors instead of coding to make myself employable in the latest stack.</text></item><item><author>woofie11</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked with two types of older engineers:&lt;p&gt;1) Ones who keep up their skills&lt;p&gt;2) Ones who don&amp;#x27;t&lt;p&gt;The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They&amp;#x27;ve hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they&amp;#x27;re now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They&amp;#x27;ve gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They&amp;#x27;ve written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs.&lt;p&gt;The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They&amp;#x27;re working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can&amp;#x27;t find a new job when that&amp;#x27;s upgraded and they&amp;#x27;re downsized.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They&amp;#x27;re very different crowds, and in very different types of companies.&lt;p&gt;My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I&amp;#x27;m doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That&amp;#x27;s what works for me. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vageli</author><text>&amp;gt; This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.&lt;p&gt;Keeping abreast of changes in the field and state of the art offer no benefits and is done solely for patients&amp;#x27; trust?</text></comment>