Entrepreneur, academic and prolific writer Vivek Wadhwa has written an article on LinkedIn as part of the “Influencer” blogs. The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age
I’m a fan of Vivek but this time around I felt he missed the point. There are too many counter-points and corrections to put in a simple comment so here now are my thoughts on his article.
Here’s my tl;dr – If you want job security, be good at what you do.
Vivek (paraphrasing) – “Information Technology is “an “up or out†profession”
fs: News flash: in a free market economy is every profession is up or out. This should not be news to anyone and certainly is not limited to IT.
Vivek: “even those with masters degrees and Ph.Ds have reason to worry.”
fs: This has alway been the case – in IT there is no correlation between advanced qualifications like PhDs and MSc and career advancement. With possibly some rare exceptions in very specialized areas.
Vivek: “Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000″
fs: Duh! The key here is out-of-date skills. Again, this is really an obvious statement. If your skills are out of date, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you won’t make money.
Vivek: “The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: They will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques”
fs: 100% opinion. No real basis in fact here. I would say how quickly someone learns something boils down to how smart they are, how motivated they are and ultimately how good they are at learning. If you haven’t tried something new in a while it’s going to take time to grease those wheels and get them turning. On the other hand if you’re hacking things together literally everyday, you will have no trouble picking up a new technology, platform, concept, whatever.
I think Vivek had a point but he lost it somewhere and instead went for a controversial headline and wrote an article to back it up. Ageism. Dirty Secret. Blech.
The bottom line: if you want to stay relevant (in any job):
a) Keep your skills current – This means learn new things BEFORE you need to know them. A lot of the comments on that article are “I applied to XYZ job, I’m over 50 and only need a weekend to learn something but the company won’t call me back.”. This is full of “wrong”. If I am hiring for a skillset and you don’t have it I’m not going to call you. End of story.
b) Stay energetic – no one wants to work with a dusty old middle aged guy who wears grey cardigans and drinks soup for lunch. Keep yourself in shape. You’ll feel better.
c) Learn how to learn – I’ll write a longer post on this one but it should be self-explanatory.
So again, I generally enjoy Vivek’s writings but I felt he went for the sensationalist headline and missed the point. Between the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ASEE Prism Magazine, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and LinkedIn, he’s got a LOT of writing to do. They can’t all be winners. Hopefully he’ll re-consider and post an update.