Challenged by the larger picture

[mtbc]

I used to propose and successfully lead difficult six-figure multi-year projects, achieving research objectives at which major corporations had failed; customers typically paid around $250/hr for my time and were satisfied. Then, my career took something of a dive. The financial crisis certainly didn't help: I had taken the precautionary measure of moving to the Boston area in anticipation of needing to find more work but, between the economy, my inability to talk about my more interesting projects, then our move to Scotland, I now find myself in a regular software development job earning far less than I did a decade ago.

I oughtn't be ungrateful: my present post is about as secure as a grant-funded position can be, I am now at a pay level that actually allows me to support my family sustainably, my colleagues make my work environment nice, my work is useful, and the technical challenges and deadlines are easier than I've typically had to face in the past; I am also well-insulated from many management-level hassles. Additionally, since moving to our present village, we now have a landlord who actually appears to be sane: so long as we don't destroy the house and we pay rent in a timely manner, they stay out of our lives. Both our children seem happy and healthy and are doing fine academically and socially.

Still, money is tight. We have enough, but little more: we haven't had a proper holiday for years now and, while it must seem antisocial, I avoid joining my colleagues for lunch in a local restaurant or for an after-work drink at a bar or similar because I just can't afford the habit of that kind of entertainment expenditure. There thus isn't much comfortable room for less income.

I am also quite conscious that it will not be easy to get future jobs. When looking for software development work in Boston in my mid-thirties my age was already raising eyebrows. I know that I can still learn new things and take instruction from those who are my juniors in every sense, but they don't know that. Looking for well-paid computing work around Perthshire when I'm nearing fifty? Ha, I can dream. A colleague who was made redundant has ended up working for a Swiss bank in Edinburgh, not the most convenient if I want to keep my children in the same secondary school in Perth, and after my many years as a defense contractor I have been trying to avoid moving into oil and finance too thus achieving a trifecta of evil, despite that there are actually functional programming jobs in finance.

Some varieties of career change may help but they are difficult to arrange when I need to maintain a good full-time salary throughout.

So, things were once going very well but have generally declined and an augur would probably not have good news for me. I have made some poor decisions and I now have limited room in which to engineer a reversal of fortune. Of course, I have learned lessons along the way, for which I am grateful: I look forward to someday having opportunity to apply them. With hindsight I would have done some things very differently but that is the past and I am certainly not spent yet.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Ick. /-8

I'm now in my forties, and it never occurred to me to think of that as an impediment to getting a software engineering job. And I've not heard complaints from people in their fifties, either. I've also worked with several teams based in Boston, Cambridge and Nashua that included people older than me. What matters more is how current one's skills are — and in an industry where things can become obsolete overnight, having been around for a few extra decades isn't especially worrying in that respect, surely?

To state the obvious, there will be more tech jobs in Silicon Glen, Silicon Fen, Manchester or London than in Dundee. The cost of living is higher as well, of course, but these are the tradeoffs we make.

Do you have any experience of working from home and telecommuting? It's definitely not for me, personally, but if it worked for you, you could live up there and work for practically anybody!

[mtbc]

That's certainly encouraging, thank you. I can certainly continue to learn new things through self-study and experimentation: it's been a relief to find that I'm so far undiminished in that regard. A disadvantage of my current job perhaps is that I am not having to much advance my skills; in principle they encourage it, but in practice not much makes sense beyond writing simple Python scripts (I hadn't used Python before, but between OOP and Perl 5 and Haskell I am finding it easy to use) and perhaps a chance to use React.js in due course. In my previous job I was working plenty on the whole technology stack from PL/SQL to Tomcat to jQuery and that was largely stuff with which I largely wasn't much familiar when I started. At home now I've got to grips with OpenBSD I'm trying to again make time to learn Erlang, I'm enjoying that.

I telecommute really well actually: I am more creative and productive (through being less distracted), they get some of my otherwise-commuting time as work time, and I'm happy to write up thoughts and share code and chat via IRC or H.323 or whatever to stay in touch, communicate where I'm going, and happy to frequently provide evidence of progress. I'd also be okay with spending the occasional week on-site if they cover reasonable expenses. In fact, my current de facto supervisor lives in Germany and I work plenty with a guy in Edinburgh so I'm kind of half-telecommuting from my desk in the office as it is, expensive headset at hand. While I lived in Cambridge, England, I moonlighted designing and implementing a sort of composable-components equation-solving simulator for engineered devices paid as a consultant for OSU's Center for Automotive Research. I've also done remote UNIX sysadmin just fine. However, I think I've only telecommuted for people I'd previously worked in person for; I'm not sure how hard it'd be to convince people who don't already know me to let me start off mostly telecommuting, though one'd think they'd be glad to save the overhead of providing office space and facilities.