My father worked into his 80s and I saw firsthand how once he hit 60 years old how much harder it was for him to land a new job. As such, I’ve always gone out of my way to ensure such folks get a fair shot in my ~25 years of being a people manager.
And every time I’ve hired someone 60+, even if they are new/junior for the role - it’s worked out in spades.
The unique perspective, what’s seems like a “new” problem is often an already solved problem from decades ago, just the wealth of knowledge … and again, this surprising still applies even if the individual is junior in their experience.
What’s best is the work ethic & respect. It’s sad but true, that individual knows you could have easily hired a 20 year old kid but didn’t. And the thanks, trust and respect you immediately gain with them often translates into them becoming a dedicate individual who goes above and beyond in their job.
So just saying, please actively give these folks their fair shot and not just hire the new kid straight out of college.
I'm a 73-year-old Canadian programmer with no formal education in computing.
After completing a PhD in pure Mathematics, I started working the next day writing scheduling algorithms in Fortran on an IBM 4341 (my supervisor played poker with the company President, so that helped).
Although I picked up Fortran quickly, I had to study scheduling algorithms because my specialty was mathematical logic.
Then I became a university Statistical consultant, but I knew nothing about that either (my boss wanted to learn logic).
Five years later, when Prolog became a popular AI language, I quit my job and began writing expert systems as an independent.
Prolog (PROgramming in LOGic) is based on the first-order predicate calculus, so my formal training was exactly what I needed to understand logic programming.
After that I branched into databases, which I'm still doing as an independent.
So, I didn't need to know anything about computing to become a programmer.
But my domain knowledge (math) gave me a powerful tool to solve some computing problems.
Late 50s veteran here. The 4341 was my first machine (running DOS/VSE) back in 1990.
Those were fun days! (Weren't they all. The 4341 was soon replaced by client/server setups, which then fell to J2EE, which then fell to distributed setups like k8s....)
My father worked into his 80s and I saw firsthand how once he hit 60 years old how much harder it was for him to land a new job. As such, I’ve always gone out of my way to ensure such folks get a fair shot in my ~25 years of being a people manager.
And every time I’ve hired someone 60+, even if they are new/junior for the role - it’s worked out in spades.
The unique perspective, what’s seems like a “new” problem is often an already solved problem from decades ago, just the wealth of knowledge … and again, this surprising still applies even if the individual is junior in their experience.
What’s best is the work ethic & respect. It’s sad but true, that individual knows you could have easily hired a 20 year old kid but didn’t. And the thanks, trust and respect you immediately gain with them often translates into them becoming a dedicate individual who goes above and beyond in their job.
So just saying, please actively give these folks their fair shot and not just hire the new kid straight out of college.
And that 61 year old might be you some day.