[vb-saan]

Originally Posted by selfdrive

Need some suggestions on reskilling.
…
Timeline for putting this in place is end 2023. Happy to hear your suggestions.

I don’t know about the situation in India, but probably good to look for roles at the business side where in you can manage internal programs/BAU activities. From my experience, work-life balance is much better than IT PM/consulting roles. At least here, experience counts well for such roles. The only thing I miss from my consulting days is travel (which anyway is non-existent for past 2+ years)

Actually, the 40s scene is that bad?

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by selfdrive

Need some suggestions on reskilling.

I have 20+ years of experience and am in a PM role since the last few years. I intend to downscale and take up an individual contributor role that will allow me better work life balance and hopefully quality time with the family, to support the older generation in their golden years and also spend some time with children before they move on with their careers.
...
As we grow older, perhaps the rigidity is more. So I would be looking for something in Pune itself.

Been a while since our SB road meetups, no? And don't make it sound as if we are that old dude, 40s are the new 30s (haven't you heard?)

Have you considered program manager roles - a lot of the new firms (read: startups, NGOs, etc.) do look for someone with the experience of managing multiple internal and external stakeholders and getting the program executed/done.

Even if you are dealing with a firm in the tech space, the role expectations are more of operational capabilities than tech capabilities. Talk to folks who are doing that if that helps. A young(er) person can not bring that to the table that easily so firms/HRs are/might be more flexible on these roles. But going through referrals is obviously better.

[hungrygamer]

Ok here are my 2 cents and i exactly fall into this group 40 plus and in it

Roles for 40 plus i.e 15 plus years of experience were always slim but they are there.

Its better to be in bread and butter development teams than niche stuff like ai or strategy. The latter pay much better but roles are limited


However if you are in it , need to upgrade constantly and need to know basics if not advanced of cloud technologies

Testing unless automation and dba activities are almost extinct , if you are ok these streams - get out

Pay is still good and more and more offshore centres are opening up so the present 40 something lot given they upgrade constantly might get to see the end of their career come naturally

People management and project management are required as ever but never EVER write project management in your resume , it should be done not heard

[vrprabhu]

A small detour in this discussion :

Originally Posted by catchjyoti

.... most of the newcomers we get nowadays lack the core software engineering skills that were common a decade or two back. The newer languages have freed them from managing memory and other attributes. This has resulted in more "loose" programming.

... using Borland C++ editor where the programs had to run in Windows CE machines. Man - did we have to be super diligent in managing active variable usage!

Thank god I am an end user and not a developer / programmer! Gives me full freedom to ask stupid questions and expect insane performance!!

Your post reminded me of the days using Windows 3.1 (windows for work groups) with 640KB ram. MS Word, WordStar, Lotus123 all ran flawlessly. Windows 95 came, with the same ram, the machine used to handle all this + network. Win98 (in colour!) - ram had to be upgraded, since it needed to handle a modem and manage telecalling (our LAN was on a SCO Unix HP server with a humungous 2MB ram!) and so on....

Cut to today (i.e. 30 years later), I am sitting in front of a sleek 30" All-in-One hp desktop running Win10 on a 9th gen (?) intel chip with 4 GB ram, and system struggles to multi-task. IT support has only one solution - upgrade to 8 GB!! When I ask them to examine the running programs, improve the paging / caching process and purge unwanted event logging, they look at me as if I am crazy (nowadays who the hell has the time to go through all the system logs? Especially, when the entire domain is controlled centrally. When a machine crashes, it is next to impossible to 'restore' - all that is done is reload the OS; nobody is interest is going through the event log or alerts or whatever to see what went wrong)

OT -

1. Many of my colleagues seem to agree that browsers have become resource crazy these days. Why so?

2. Anti-virus programs were blamed for slowing down the system; not any more - there is something called DLP (data loss provision) out there, which reads every bit of incoming and outgoing traffic!

3. Ever calculated the cost incurred by business, because your system is slow to respond? Hold your breath. My observation over the last few months show that 150 hours (~30 minutes/day) = an equivalent of 20 man days a year, is consumed while waiting in the 'click - load - run - ready / execute - complete - close / save' process. That means, if I am paid for 30 days work a month, ~1.5 days is work free i.e. spent on waiting for the system to respond or complete the task ......

Food for thought for those 40+?

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by vrprabhu

Your post reminded me of the days using Windows 3.1 (windows for work groups) with 512 MB ram. MS Word, WordStar, Lotus123 all ran flawlessly. Windows 95 came, with the same ram, the machine used to handle all this + network. Win98 (in colour!) - ram had to be upgraded, since it needed to handle a modem and manage telecalling (our LAN was on a SCO Unix HP server with a humungous 2 GB ram!) and so on....

I think you mean 640KB and 2MB RAM, unless you enjoyed 1000 times more memory than rest of us mortals in the early 90s. There is still time to edit...

[vrprabhu]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I think you mean 640KB and 2MB RAM, unless you enjoyed 1000 times more memory than rest of us mortals in the early 90s

Oops - my 'human' memory is corrupt, I guess...

But, yeah, the PC memory was in KB but the HP Server was MB, and definitely more than 2 MB (it landed in India from Netherlands, courtesy HCL). Faintly recollect something like the ram being improved from SDRam to DDR on a subsequent upgrade, with multiple slots on the motherboard; and the 2 GB (yes, GB) DAT backup getting exhausted in the initial six months itself.

PS - Do I send a mod request for change or let my mistake be cast in stone

[selfdrive]

Originally Posted by vrprabhu

A small detour in this discussion :
....
2. Ever calculated the cost incurred by business, because your system is slow to respond? Hold your breath. My observation over the last few months show that 150 hours (~30 minutes/day) = an equivalent of 20 man days a year, is consumed while waiting in the 'click - load - run - ready / execute - complete - close / save' process. That means, if I am paid for 30 days work a month, ~1.5 days is work free i.e. spent on waiting for the system to respond or complete the task ......

Cost paid is not by business but by you the employee. At the end of the day you have to finish your work, so any time you spend waiting is essentially your loss

By the way while you are at it, check your bulleting. Seems you are having multiple no. 2 and not moving to 3 in your post

Just kidding

[NetfreakBombay]

Originally Posted by vrprabhu

That means, if I am paid for 30 days work a month, ~1.5 days is work free i.e. spent on waiting for the system to respond or complete the task ......

Food for thought for those 40+?

At 40+... days / weeks do not matter. Only thing that should matter is target. Slow desktop and other impediments are there just to keep the job interesting

[white-power]

Several decades ago hardware used to be expensive and writing memory efficient programs were important. Then hardware became cheap computing moved from high end servers to cheap PCs clustered together. Memory hogging VB applications ruled then. Then came the we application craze and Chrome hogs all the RAM.

The latest kid on the block is AWS Lambda and they count the CPU cycles and memory used by your code to bill you. So programmers out there, be careful how you create the objects in your Java program cos you may not be able to get away with it by increasing the heap.

[V.Narayan]

Folks I have been reading this thread for some months and I sincerely empathize with the travails and difficulties many of the members here have faced and continue to face. I'm not an engineer nor am I an IT person by any stretch. But I do sit on the sidelines of the industry and observe.

Some thoughts....

Some of what folks are facing are macro shifts not of their making. But some further trends are moving forward very seriously which I'm sure most readers are aware of. The first is what I phrase as -- "Will the global work force be available to all globally". With bandwidth, IT security and WFH all coming together a lot of the work earlier being done in India is being outsourced to not just domain specialists in USA but to Eastern Europe, Ukraine etc and with this work force the pitfalls {for the employer} of attrition, and disgruntled employees largely disappears as these gig economy workers in far off Ukraine take up what were till yesterday Indian jobs.

The second is the significant effort being put into automation of the process of developing and writing code to the next level. This too is very real with some {it not all} larger Indian tech companies. In my 21 years of investing in tech companies I have never seen this much more vigorous and more real with serious $ investments behind it in India. At least some of the impetus has been the great resignation and the implications it has had for company managements, shareholders and most critically the end invoice paying customer.

[three10]

First post in t-bhp after probably lurking for more than a decade.

Crossed 40 two years back - Here's how I still retain the edge:

1) Be really (I mean, the best) at one thing - I've spent almost two decades building number of teams, mostly working with people in the 0-8 year experience. What I've seen in general (with a few exceptions) is the will to excel by putting in those many hours of effort (expanded in the next point). Everyone looks for a quick win, and if the next company offers you 5-10% more than the hike you get, it's an immediate jump. This has happened numerous times - so much so that it started impacting my mental health. That's when I went back to my management and requested them for individual contributor roles. It has definitely taken some tension off my head - I just have to focus on me and my work to improve and excel in my field.

2) Lack of effort - I've rarely seen people spend more than 1 hour researching something and solving a problem. What typically happens is people look through the first two pages of google search - if they're lucky, stack overflow has the answer, or they post on some internal forum and wait for someone to come and provide them with a ready made solution.

3) Investing in yourself - technical skills are DAMN IMPORTANT. I spend a good amount of time studying and keeping myself up to date - sometimes I can't get sleep at night and I wake up and study (or browse through here as I'm doing now ). Are you spending time acquiring a new skill every year. I"ve figured out a handy way to do this - I sit down with my resume every six months - If I've not added anything that is relevant to my field, and on the horizon in terms of requirement (from an employability perspective), then I'm in deep $hit. That gives me another 6 months to course correct.

4) Be Selfish - crappy bosses / team mates / work will always come by - make sure there is always a value addition to yourself in every interaction or in every work that you do. If you don't see it in certain cases, do what Fangio preached - put in the least amount of effort to get the job done (to meet the required standards). Use the spare time on point 3.

5) And the biggest mistake I made - do not spend more than 7-8 years in a single company no matter what. I wish I could have changed that now, having spent close to 13.5 years with my first company (but that's water under the bridge). It freaked me out at one point of time when I realised that I didn't have any employable skills and that If I got fired, I would have been without a job and without any foreseeable future.

[NavtejS]

Originally Posted by three10

5) And the biggest mistake I made - do not spend more than 7-8 years in a single company no matter what. I wish I could have changed that now, having spent close to 13.5 years with my first company (but that's water under the bridge). It freaked me out at one point of time when I realised that I didn't have any employable skills and that If I got fired, I would have been without a job and without any foreseeable future.

Hi three10!
Even though I am not from IT sector but could relate to your points very well. I think it applies to all sectors.
Specially the last point. Yesterday one of my colleagues lost his his job to a very bizzare incident. He had spent his entire professional career in a single company . Sadly he will have to look at another place.

The point regarding upgrading yourself every 6 months was i wanted some clarity. I am from hospitality sector and just shifted to retail. By upgrading do you mean certification courses only or something else ?

[Aceman82]

Among the general doom and gloom in this thread, let me make a contrarian point. I hope this is useful to someone staring in their career in the IT/Tech industry.

These are my personal opinion and without wanting to provide too much info in an open forum, I work for one the 'Big Tech' organizations as an Individual contributor (IC) and yes, touching forty's.

1. I have only changed companies once in the last ~ 2 decades. It has never affected my career progression (or) the pay.
2. Things could not be better for IC's who are technically strong. From my own personal experience, I keep getting weekly pings for roles across the globe.
3. In leading product based organizations, senior individual contributors are very highly valued. Age does _not_ play a factor, only output does.

The key things to keep in mind are below,

1.Never lose the technical edge. Keep playing around and experimenting and updating ones skills. Again easier said than done. Spending time on weekends watching Netflix is much better and frankly much nicer, than fighting with a Raspberry pi (or) trying to read and implement a new paper. Its very difficult to have the discipline but the rewards of doing that are exponentially high.

2. Not be content with one technology or language. Have myself moved from assembly language programming to C, C++, Java, Java Script and its flavors, Kotlin, Scala and Python. Have worked (and continue to keep working) on everything from microcontroller's to Machine learning (AI). Okay, maybe not much on microcontrollers now .

3. Take calculated risks and experiment a lot. Something will work eventually and failing multiple times (and fast) is a valuable experience in itself.

[three10]

Originally Posted by NavtejS

Hi three10!
Even though I am not from IT sector but could relate to your points very well. I think it applies to all sectors.
Specially the last point. Yesterday one of my colleagues lost his his job to a very bizzare incident. He had spent his entire professional career in a single company . Sadly he will have to look at another place.

The point regarding upgrading yourself every 6 months was i wanted some clarity. I am from hospitality sector and just shifted to retail. By upgrading do you mean certification courses only or something else ?

Hi, yes - even though I'm from IT, this is equally applicable to all sectors.

I'm not too aware of the retail or hospitality sector, so I'm not sure if I can give relevant examples. But being in the field, you would have a good idea of what specific skills are currently in demand, and what skills employers are looking out in the near future.

Once you have that nailed down, focus on how you are going to a) acquire that skill and b) prove to an employer (current or a future employer) that you have that skill nailed down.

this is where trainings / certifications come into the picture - I'm not how you can do this specific to your domain, but I hope this gives you a line of thinking.

the 6 month checkpoint is essentially taking a pause at the middle of the year (I usually do it in the last two weeks of June) to see if I have done something along these lines. if not, I prioritise this for the rest of the year.

TBH, this is very similar to a performance appraisal you have at your work - except that you are both the appraiser and the appraisee

[am1m]

Originally Posted by Aceman82

Things could not be better for IC's who are technically strong.

Never lose the technical edge. Keep playing around and experimenting and updating ones skills.

Great points! I'd add domain to that. Try and gain an insight into the business needs of clients in the domain you work on. Attend their sales conferences, even if you are a programmer.

Also good to see the idea of remaining an IC (individual contributor) all through your career is gaining some traction. Am sure it's been posted before, but good to remember that not everyone is cut out to be a people manager.

Was lucky at the beginning to my career itself to be exposed to some really cool colleagues in the US who were in their 50s back then (early 2000s) but still had the designation of s/w engineer or programmer. But the depth and wealth of genuine programming experience these guys had ensured that even VPs and Directors listened when they spoke and HR didn't try their cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all people/team management tactics on them! Made me realize that career progression does not mean you "have" to become a people manager after x years.

And to be honest even after 20 years in this industry, I still see most India-based managers at several US-HQ'd IT services and product companies (and it's even worse at EU-HQ'd companies!) performing the role of mailboxes - merely conveying what the US management wants to the Indian team. Or maintaining Excel sheets of how many hours an employee stayed at their desks and how many leaves they took. How long will an industry keep paying inflated salaries for such non-value adding, supervisory (as opposed to strategic or managerial) tasks?! Such roles will always be at risk.