Too old at 35.

[mudskipper]

I was in a room today with a group of about 5 mid 20 somethings when one pulled up his super complex spreadsheet full of formulas & presented it to the assembled room of his peers. WoW! Incredible! The expletives of this young guys business model from his peers was incredible.

"I'm stuck on one thing" he said and proceeded to explain to the other 5 fast trackers in the company what he couldnt do. I wasn't paying that much attention & eventually one asked me to have a look. I leant forward, had a look and hit Alt-F11 to knock up VBA.

It was like Jesus had come down to earth in a space ship and ridden out on a dinosaur.

"You're all fookin kidding me, right?"

None of them even knew it existed.

[escapeUK]

What job do they do?

If they are in certain non-IT career paths they are as they have no choice.

Just everyday jobs like working in sales, accounts, production. Most people arent in careers they are in jobs to earn money.

"You're all fookin kidding me, right?"

None of them even knew it existed.

I bet they know lots of socialist dogma, but very little life skills that people will actually pay you for.

[doodab]

I can sort of understand where he's going from. I meet quite a few middle aged clowns who come out with the old "I used to be technical" line, usually before asking for help with something incredibly basic. The "I'm not technical" ones drive me mental TBH. Why are you here then? Did you lie to get through the door?

OTOH I've met plenty of guys who grew up on mainframes and vaxen and adapted to the modern world just fine, nothing phases them and I've learn a lot from them over the years. So it's perfectly possible to stay technically current and if you do you have an advantage over a youngun IMO.

Personally I like learning things but I take a slightly different attitude now, I tend to avoid jumping on every next big thing bandwagon and concentrate on stuff that interests me. I know that if I need to pick something up quickly for a job I can, and 90% of what makes you a good developer is transferrable between paradigms.

[Macavity]

Too old at 35.

Few guys under 35 can actually program cleanly and concisely, let alone understand the business domain (if its banking).

All the 20 year olds I see are busy writing their own frameworks and inventing their own way of doing things. It takes a certain amount of experience to work with the time honoured standard solutions and patterns.

[Scrag Meister]

If I need an excel VBA macro though, I'd normally get some young grad to do it.

Yeah but when push comes to shove you invite a 46 year old from England to review his work.

[sbakoola]

yes, its very worrying. When I hit 50 its unlikely that I'll be in banking still contracting. Need to get plan b sorted pronto.

[Lockhouse]

My take on it is; when I started I had to do two years in IT before I became really productive. You couldn't just write a program and feed it to a mainframe, you had to understand the file system, JCL, linking etc all before you understood how your actual code worked. This was all without Google - it was all done from manuals and your peers. If you were lucky, you got your training on a good site which was run properly. That structured depth of appreciation of technical issues just isn't available to people today who grew up with IT and learn things organically. They may be talented but their ideas are all over the place.

[NotAllThere]

Yeah but when push comes to shove you invite a 46 year old from England to review his work.

Touché.

[darmstadt]

My take on it is; when I started I had to do two years in IT before I became really productive. You couldn't just write a program and feed it to a mainframe, you had to understand the file system, JCL, linking etc all before you understood how your actual code worked. This was all without Google - it was all done from manuals and your peers. If you were lucky, you got your training on a good site which was run properly. That structured depth of appreciation of technical issues just isn't available to people today who grew up with IT and learn things organically. They may be talented but their ideas are all over the place.

WHS +1 (and still doing that, mentoring a young chap at the moment this very way)