On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:04:29 +0000 (UTC), Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, "William W. Plummer" said:
user wrote:

snip
Personally, I prefer working in IT, where the surest way to get
a huge pay increase is simply to threaten to quit. ;-)

Threatening to quit works until you are about 35 years old. Maybe a bit
longer if you walk on water. But later in life you can expect to be
pushed out in favor of younger, technology-current engineers.

There is no hard and fast rule that says you can't stay technology-current
as you age. I started off doing FORTRAN on mainframes, went to C and
Unix, then C++ and Unix, and here I am at 44 doing Java on Linux, making
50% more than I was making when I was 35. And every step up the ladder
was done by identifying what I wanted to do next and teaching myself.


Unfortunately, that's unusual. My experience is that most developers
stop learning at about age 30. From that point on, they stagnate and
die. I can't count the number of times I've interviewed people,
asked them to tell me about an article/book/etc discussing current
technology and IT issues.... and find they haven't cracked a book
since college.

What's the next technology trend? I don't know, but I'm damn sure I'm
going to teach it to myself before Java on Linux jobs dry up. Although I
have a nagging suspicion that my next "technology" will be "how to manage
a team of programmers in India to make sure that what they produce isn't a
giant cluster **** like every other outsourcing project I've seen".


Oh, but it worked so WELL at GC.....

- Rich