Presentation: Getting Old(er) in Tech: Staying Relevant

Don: Today I'm working on refactoring, and that's what Corgibytes does, we efactor software. We look for legacy software that has too much tech debt, we write unit tests, clean things up and change the processes to support continuous integration and test-driven development.

Don: I have folk that are of my age call me from time to time asking me for work. They know of me because I've been doing technical presentations, articles, and books for years. Also, I'd be at conferences and folks would come up and start talking to me.They would actually be looking for work, and they're my age. I didn't have much to tell them other than they need to get more training. They let themselves go for 10 or 20 years. I also go cross-country doing Java training, specifically for the IBM i community, and I would see the same people come to my same Java training classes. They just didn't work at it. What I found is that people lose the ability to learn. One thing I tell people to do their first year of programming every year where you have that energy to learn as much as you can every year. The talk was driven by phone calls that I would get from folks that knew me and were looking for work, and wanted me to coerce that person to work or find how they should improve their career. They were losing their jobs or the technology that they were working on was not no longer marketable.

Don: It's more of a mental attitude. I will cover my ideas for how to keep learning and learning strategies, making learning goals and learning mechanisms (because there's various types of learners.) I will have bullet lists in the presentation, but mostly it's going to be different ways of looking at your career. I try to coerce them to think about their career differently. It's more about changing their mental strategy and perspective on learning. Then I will give guidance about different types of tools and blog posts or seminars or more formal training.

It's important to find your particular learning type. It's become more prevalent today where you might only have five minutes to learn one little thing from a tutorial. So there are various recommendations of the things that I use on a regular basis to enhance their learning strategy.

There are some of the stronger parts of the presentation that I'm going to be talking about. Maybe you need to find a new job. Maybe you're at a dead end where you're at. Maybe you need to pull different developers in as mentors. Maybe you're not comparing yourself with the right groups of people. It's about directing their career for longevity. I've seen too many people that stayed at the same job, at the same company, did the same thing, didn't really improve the code that much. They did that, and they ended up being valuable to that company but to no one else. And then the technology was outdated or dead.

Don: The biggest thing is to have a better attitude and more energy to enhance their career through continued learning and interacting with other other folks that they can learn from. The second point would be some different strategies that they can do short term.

Don: Continued motivation. When somebody reads self-improvement articles, it's to increase their motivation, to continue what they are doing already. They are looking for that spike of motivation to continue the track they already are on it. Certainly there's got to be some people that have been at one company too long, or with one technology too long, or haven't been enhancing and taken advantage of the skill sets that are within their own company. For some, the only training they do is to go to a conference. They'll walk away from my presentation with a better motivation to take advantage of a variety of other learning strategies and tools.