If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind...<p>- The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went directly into industry.<p>- The young doctor FINALLY completed their training, with a truckload of debt. In the horizon, they see many sources of downward pressure on medical pay (rising power of insurance companies, malpractice liability, lower reimbursement rates due to Medicare and Obamacare, etc.). In 20 years, will Medicine be a $300K/year job or a $125K/year job? Oh...and a bunch of their peers already dropped out, loaded with debt.<p>- Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. They are young enough to start a business and bounce back when things don't work out. Young enough to start a big family. If their spouse is also a middle class professional, they have a decent chance of saving $1MM by age 45 for a solid start on retirement. Making enough to pay down their debt early.<p>Yeah...the back end of the engineering career has a shelf life; you get your money up front. Using it wisely is up to you.
> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career.<p>I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in their careers.<p>Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years' experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent) required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all prefer that to be the case.
Ugh. Confirmation bias and sample size aside, these are MIT alumni. Aren't they already supposed to be above average?<p>That being said, he didn't exactly say what sort of engineers these folks were. Electrical? Software? Big difference..<p>Also, one thing that didn't jive, if they are in financially uncomfortable retirement, why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?
This post reeks of confirmation bias or at least the sample size is too low to draw any conclusions. What if that software engineer didn't want to progress his career and was happy at the level he was? What about those engineers that did go into management? I could be wrong but if you choose to stay in a roll a 30yo can fill why would it be strange that you would be expected to compete with those younger to get a job?
Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since. Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about tech, business, travel, flying and politics.
Beyond the the ~7year business cycle, career stability in Medicine vs. Engineering is subject to long-term trends.<p>For the current 50 year old cohort, the end of the cold war has to be the most relevant factor in the opportunities available to them. There's nothing like a bunch of missile projects to get MIT-er's some work.<p>The spending rate on US healthcare is probably not sustainable over the next thirty years, and many physicians could see Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements plummet. In short this observation of career disparity could be reversed after several decades of unforeseeable future occurring.
One point he admits in the beginning... <i>There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from.</i><p>This doesn't include doctors who quit medical school, academics who got pushed out of the funnel, and lawyers who couldn't get good law jobs. The engineers also may have already been victims of age discrimination by the first dot com bubble.
The other conclusion is, always be hireable. I guess it’s hard to be 50 and pride yourself to work for senior-senior level salary when a 30 year old can easily do your job.<p>Hierarchies worked very well in the uni prof’s favour, but engineering companies tend to apply flatter structures. If there’s nothing that keeps the young folks competing, they will. So for us, engineers it may be a good idea to move to supervisory roles, a field with harder-to-aquire skills, or start teaching later on.<p>(+1 for small sample size and confirmation bias though. /re: @pixelscript)
The link of the OP points to the blog. The link to the post is
<a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...</a>
The calculation of total lifetime earnings / career track is tough to make in advance. It's important to remember that the licensed professions (doctor, lawyer) have significant costs to enter. The advantages are that the fields change more slowly, cannot be done remotely, and are licensed. This allows you to more easily accumulate knowledge and experience over time, and prevents competition to some degree. Theoretically, that should lead to a stabler career, but a higher earning one is harder to be sure about.<p>I have a CS degree and used to be a decent programmer, but became a lawyer. To maximize my lifetime earnings, should I have simply moved to California and gone into tech eight years ago? Right now, things are doing well now in tech, and there are too many lawyers, but would that have meant I'd be completely out of a job at age 50 due to ageism/competition? That was my fear, and not an entirely irrational one, since these discussions keep coming up.
Regarding the lawyer, there's a more complex bait and switch going on here...<p>As you progress in the practice of law, you spend less time working on document review and trial / transaction prep. Due to the nature of law firms, senior lawyers tend to either be focused on client development (sales!) or various forms of cat herding (project / business management!)...<p>Wait... tell me again about the career prospects of engineers in their 50's who (successfully) switched into sales and management?<p>[um yeah, nothing to see here....]
or: the successful programmers do not bother to show up to pan handling events<p>and/or: even the failures still make lots of money until 50, while the failures on other fields aren't even invited.<p>or: I'm just in denial :-(
I can provide a data point that might be less biased toward the successful. At a recent informal reunion of my dorm, I saw much the same thing as Phil saw (in fact he was there). If you're not running a business, or in a professional role where age discrimination can't touch you, you better be exceptionally well-known in your field. If you are doing the kind of technical work, like coding, design, etc. you did most of your career, the only way to be compensated in line with your experience level is to be in a senior technical management position (VP Eng., or CTO) or consulting.<p>Based on what I saw then, I think Phil's observations are accurate.<p>On the other hand, consulting isn't so bad. There is such a lot of bad engineering out there, there is an infinite market for old guys (and the few women of our cohort) to fix things that are fucked up.
I'm curious to see if this is as big of an issue 20-30 years in the future as it is now. 30 year olds in America were raised with computers in the schools (if not the classroom and home.) 20 year olds were raised with computers in the home and in their pockets. [1]<p>Will we continue to see people over 50 (or even 40) as unable to grasp new technology if they were raised in a society that placed such a high value on technology being an integral part of life from a young age? Part of me says no, part of me says yes.<p>[1] I'm not saying it won't be an issue. Just as sexism and racism are still around in the workplace, ageism will continue to be an issue. I'm just wondering if it won't be seen as the norm.
None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. After a certain point the impact of a person's improved programming skills does not get significantly better over time, at least for what most companies need. Therefore a company becomes incentivized to hire younger engineers who cost less as they still get similar or even better output.
As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in".<p>What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?
Do people here anticipate programming being their lifelong career, or do they in good faith, think there will be a switch later?<p>Personally, I've done this for 15 years and I keep doing contracting to pay the bills but really I'm pretty done with it.<p>What about you?
"<i>There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from.</i>"<p>Slight?
Me I had no choice, now I essentially have no career at all because you reach the end game where the industry stops talking to you despite all the money you made people. Pivoting to education would be a logical choice in a civilized society but this is no such place so instead of buying me off the market some poor business is going to wind up losing all their customers because I have no choice but to become a sole founder and learn business kung fu lol, its either do that or wait for unemployment to run out and then die from starvation and exposure basically unless I want to drive uber to pay them essentially 9 cents per mile because 49 cents per mile is 9 cents less than the cost of running the car in california lol.
I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric?<p>I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...
Missing an alternative option: migrate to, perhaps even become citizen in, a country with a half decent social welfare system.<p>> Lesson: Unless you are confident that your skills are very far above average, don’t take a career path that subjects you to the employment market once you’re over 50 (and/or make sure that by age 50 you’ve saved enough for a retirement that begins at age 50 or 55
For reference, this is the URL of the actual post (as opposed to the current URL to the year/month entries):<p><a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...</a>
I've always thought that the age discrimination problem in the software engineering world will self-solve when the first generation of programmers age into the discriminatory age brackets.<p>Besides, some of the best programmers I know are 50+.
I can't imagine a programmer making enough $$ to be able to show up at an event where the main goal is donation.<p>Granted some did show up.<p>Let's list the careers that were still considered safe age 50.
Doctor. Lawyer. Professor.
All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance?<p>Most likely not.<p>But the other engineers (some with uncertain future) are the ones who designed/built/produced something for the society.
Ageism exists in the professions but it's legible and practically published. If you start law school at 30, you probably won't get Biglaw unless you clerk for a Supreme Court justice. You can get into a PhD program at any age, but you're not going to get a tenure-track position if you're after 40. Midlife career switchers generally don't get in.<p>The difference is that, in the professions, you have to get in early but it's the norm to move up fast enough that ageism isn't a problem because, even if you make a couple of mistakes, you'll be at an age-appropriate level. You may not be a biglaw partner or chief surgeon earning 7 figures, but you'll be substantial enough that you're still taken seriously.<p>In software engineering, there isn't a well-defined sense of what "up" is or what's "age appropriate". There isn't a published career track and a legible ageism. It's there, but it's hard to tell exactly <i>when</i> it's there. Is being a programmer at 55 age-appropriate? If you're an AI researcher at Google X, then yes, absolutely. If you're checking your Jira every morning to figure out which user stories you're going to be working on, then no one's going to believe that you chose to be a programmer instead of a manager. (Hell, <i>I</i> wouldn't believe you. I might still hire you, because I'm mature enough to separate low social status in one theater apart from low ability. If you're 55 and still have to deal with user stories, it means that you managed your social status poorly; but you might still be a rock-solid engineer whom I'd hire in a heartbeat.)<p>If you look at the Valley's emerging professional model, it's not a kind one and it's not one that ages well. You choose between (a) a "main sequence" where each jump is a dramatically different job, from engineer to manager to founder to investor, and where there are structural reasons why most people will never make it; or (b) fighting for the small percentage of jobs that are genuinely interesting and age-appropriate at any age.<p>I think it's much easier to deal with age if you're a consultant, because it leaves you out of the political structure of a firm. It makes people uncomfortable to have a 35-year-old "Software Manager II" overseeing a 55-year-old badass. With age, you just don't fit into the corporate hierarchy unless you've climbed it. If you're a consultant and live outside of the hierarchy, then age doesn't really matter.