Career planning: The age of least resistance

On Sunday, there was a news program about how tough it is to find work after 40s. It was full of the usual stuff about employers only looking for young people who can work 30 hours days*, and freezing out anyone too old for their taste, etc.

This is a real problem in many cases, and one that I find abhorrent. Not the least because I plan to have a long career in my chosen field, and I really don’t like the idea of having a certain age after which I should be shuffled off to do data entry tasks, if that. Especially since that age seems not too far at all. Currently, the oldest person we have in a development role is over fifty, although most of our team is late twenties to mid thirties.
   
So we reached out to one of them, asking to get a CV so we can look at that. And it took me very little time to realize why this person had a hard time finding a job. In particular, while the news program was about people who are unable to find a job, this particular person actually had a job. It just wasn’t a job that he was happy with. As far as I understand, he was paid a lot less than what he was used to, comparable to someone just starting out, rather than someone with close to two decades of experience.

Looking at the CV, it was obvious why that was. This particular person job history included a 15 years stretch in a large municipality. During which he worked mostly on VB6 programs. It has only been in the last couple of years that he started working in .NET.

Now, Microsoft released VB6 in 1998. And announced that it is moving to VB.Net in early 2000, with the .NET framework being released on 2002. By 2005, VB6 was no longer supported, and by 2008 even extended support run out. So we are talking about 7 – 8 years in which the main tool at their disposal was quite clearly a dead end.

While I’ve fond memories of VB6, and I’m pretty sure that there is still a lot of software using it. It is not surprising that demand for people with VB6 expertise has already peaked and is currently in a decline that I don’t really see changing. Note that this isn’t really surprising, and you would have to willfully ignore reality to believe that there is a strong future in VB6 in the past decade.

So we have a person with expertise in obsolete tech, trying to find a job in the market with effectively 1-2 years of experience using C#. It isn’t surprising that he got what is effectively a starter position, even given his age.  It isn’t that his age affected the offered position, it is that it didn’t.

This lead back to the advice I gave previously on the matter of career planning. Saying “I got a nice job” and resting on the laurels is a good way to end up in a marginalized position down the road.

Keeping your skills up to date (ideally as part of your job, but outside of it is if isn’t possible) is crucial, otherwise you are the guy with one year of actual experience, repeated many times over.

* Not a typo, it is intentionally stupid.