> "The lack of people over 50 working in tech is a strong indication that this group needs to reskill."

It's an indication that people over 50 can see over bs, low pay, long hours and being taxed to death, while corporations they work for pay next to nothing.

I'm over 50. Work for myself. 4 day week. From home for last 20 years. Make decent money (normally £100k+). Plan to retire well before 60. Pretty sweet.

Perhaps there's a shortage of over 50s because we earn enough to retire early? Maybe the statistic to compare us with is professionals over 50 rather than the general workforce over 50?

I work for a semiconductor manufacturer and the majority of our applications engineers are in their late 40's and above. Getting younger electronics engineers is becoming harder and we are going to start having problems over the next 5 years or so when they start retiring. I'm based in the UK and that it the situation here. I think it's also an issue in other geographies.

The problem is that companies in electronics space pay pittance to engineers. I've seen jobs with quite complex requirements paying £30k a year, whereas a young engineer could easily get twice as much doing simpler web development.

There is a higher barrier to entry as well. For IT you only need a laptop, but for electronics you need additional equipment like scopes, meters, soldering stations plus the software that is being used in the industry is prohibitively expensive. Then you'll be spending fortune on parts that you will inevitably burn through when learning.

Companies should at least octuple the salaries to make younger people consider getting into it.

"The problem is that companies in electronics space pay pittance to engineers. I've seen jobs with quite complex requirements paying £30k a year"

As other AC said semiconductors is a very well paid sector and we are short of qualified engineers. *

Perhaps because people are dissuaded to come into the arena due to misinformation like this? The UK's tech future is dim enough without this.

*For the record that's proper engineers, not software "engineers".

> *For the record that's proper engineers, not software "engineers".

Have you been to job boards at all? The "proper" engineer jobs are not very well paid.

Let me just check my salary slip and confer with my colleagues, team mates, friends and acquaintances in the sector ...

Nope no one is on anything as low as £30K. Are these for new grad positions? Or are you looking at jobs outside of the US/Europe?

Or are you looking at jobs outside of the US/UK/Europe?

There, FTFY. Remember brexshit? :-(

Don't fall for Brexiteer lie that the UK is no longer part of Europe. (Geographically.) They may want/think that, but the Gammon Distortion Field isn't strong enough to create that unreality.

>Nope no one is on anything as low as £30K. Are these for new grad positions? Or are you looking at jobs outside of the US/Europe?

Or just outside London

Taking this in conjunction with ' This shortfall prompted the BCS to state: "The lack of people over 50 working in tech is a strong indication that this group needs to reskill" ', it might also suggest that the IT sector is less bothered about accumulated experience and personal expertise in problem solving (which are both fundamental to good engineering). This certainly seems to be the case in software development, witness the several web sites dedicated to " interview questions and answers".

When I was teaching IT engineering and software development, my students actually expressed surprise that, when asked a question, I didn't immediately resort to thumbing through a textbook like (apparently) my predecessor had done. And I'm now constantly bumping into developers who state that something "can't be done" in because there isn't a library method for it. I usually find it can be done with a little ingenuity, and often very simply.

Employers in looking for IT skills persistently see older people as inflexible, unable to adapt, not in tune with modern technologies etc.

It does not matter how good you may be, this prejudice is their and it can be very difficult to get through the door. This reasoning is often confirmed because there will be a handful of dinosaurs in the business waiting for retirement who are exactly fulfil the employer's expectations of older people.

Also older people are often more experienced and because of where they are in their careers, more expensive.

The issue is with the employer and is very difficult to deal with. You can legislate as much as you like but you cannot force recruitment of a particular age. All the diversity stuff is supposed to deal with this but how do you actually put this into practice?

The issue is with the employer and is very difficult to deal with. You can legislate as much as you like but you cannot force recruitment of a particular age. All the diversity stuff is supposed to deal with this but how do you actually put this into practice?

Taxes. It's the only mean, because it's always about money.

You mention the real reason: older people are more expensive. So create quotas for companies with an IT department with more than 10 people, and every time this quota is not respected, tax the company. Use the money collected from the tax so subsidize smaller IT teams to reduce taxes on salaries of older people.

And ensure the dept is 51% women, 15% non-white, 10% gay and 1% people-who-use-emacs

DE&I BAME LGBTIQ+ OK, EMACS NO

Umm, sorry to be a pedantic grammar wonk, but "BAME" is no longer the accepted term*, now it is "BIPOC" - Black, Indigenous, People of Colour. (Although the USA still has the NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, so I am somewhat sympathetic to anyone who is as confused as I am.) The trouble is that any labelling that implies 'white' is 'normal' or the expected skin colour is bound to be problematic.

Also, although I am gay, I do get confused with all the letters after "LGBT" and what they mean.

*See, for example, the workbook, "Me and White Supremacy", by Layla F Saad, ISBN 978-1-52940-510-1.

>Also, although I am gay, I do get confused with all the letters after "LGBT" and what they mean.

Dear facist please report to your nearest re-education workshop for re-programming.

I think we will have training updates on new letters as often as we have mandatory GDPR compliance

So in most countries other than the USA, Oz, NZ, Canadia, most of the population are BIPOC (sic)...

TBH, I don't understand Twitter at all. To me it just looks like someone dropped a box of slugs moving them from the Ludlow to the frame-setter - a jumble of possibly related sentences of very little interest to anyone.

Call me old fashioned if you will, but...

Why not? (except for emacs)

One have to discuss the extension of the concept, but it already exists: [1]many European countries fix employment quotas for disabled people

Generally, the rule is that there's no obligation to fill the quota, but if you don't want to, you pay more taxes.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/soc-prot/disable/socpart/comp05_en.pdf

>Generally, the rule is that there's no obligation to fill the quota, but if you don't want to, you pay more taxes

There is no obligation to follow the law, but if you don't want to you pay more fines

Because in any randomly-selected population, it's pretty unlikely that you're going to get a distribution of people who match arbitrary characteristics of the larger population.

As for a self-selecting population - such as people interested in IT, nursing, aircraft, boats, sewing, etc. - it's astronomically improbable that it would come close to the distribution of people who match arbitrary characteristics of the larger population.

Most over 50s who worked in IT did so during the gravy train days when you could get paid ridiculous amounts of money for very little as what you did seemed like magic and there was little competition.

As such I imagine most are happily retired to their villas in Provence.

Over 60 here, still working, still waiting for the deed to the villa to show up in the mail. I should say that I get by with experience and common sense, seldom with anything that would pass for magic.

The problem with using numbers like this is that when I (63 now) started in IT (1988) there were a whole lot fewer of us in this profession than there is now. The expansion of this field did not happen until the mid 1990's. So of course we are going to be a lower percentage of out age group.

My experience with older IT staff (and we have several at my employer) is they do not keep up their skill set. They tend to have specific skills or they are stuck in the same place for years. Nothing is more pathetic than a 50 yr old service desk tech who flat out refuses to learn PowerShell? (just an example)

Or the flip side, the company they have worked for for 20 years flat out refuses to help those retrain.

Why bother when you can get a freshly qualified kid out of uni for 1/4 the price.

Of course when they get stumped how to sling 4 bits of theoretically incompatible kit together by different manufacturers, that cost saving is not so useful.

My experience with older IT staff (and we have several at my employer) is they do not keep up their skill set

I'm in a similar situation to you, but I've always been proactive at keeping up my skill set. Due to my employer's belief that "keeping up a skill set" actually means courses on "how to spot phishing attempts" and "diversity training for all", I've invested heavily in time and my own money to set up a home networking environment that many an SME would be proud of.

Maybe I need to find some like-minded greybeards and set up a consultancy company.

Great idea, actually. I've had so many requests from colleagues who've done stuff at home and e.g. discovered that their new extension conservatory would be a great place to work except that the foil backed insulation panels in the dry wall that are pierced by grounded copper pipes seem to block all the WiFi making it useless as a SOHO workspace for them.

Whereas at home I've got a cloud managed network with Cat 6 to every room, 200Mbps cable with failover to 4G and 3 PoE WAPs so there's coverage even at the far end of the garden. Perfect when I need to go and prick out some seedlings whilst attending the yet another round of compulsory implicit bias training or a mandatory slideshow/quiz on GDPR ("Which of these can hold personal data? Tick all that apply. A USB stick, a hard drive, a paper note pad, a tablet device, a print out of a completed job application form"). Well... why waste an afternoon?

I can empathise with the foil-backed panel victims, although the stone walls of my Victorian house seem to have the same problem. I've had to set up WiFi range extenders. I decided to run all my mission-critical stuff off a basic fibre-optic link which wasn't that expensive and has actually made everything quicker. If I can a drill through the stonework I may extend it.

mandatory slideshow/quiz on GDPR

Oh yes, I forgot about that one: I must add it my list of Company Certificates. In the meantime I'll have to decide between setting up my LoraWAN network or "Advanced Excel - Customing the Ribbon".

What no cabled networking?

One to my PC, one to upstairs for boys PCs and PS4s, one to my PS4.

Indeed. It was only this morning that I was reflecting on how comes, as an old grey soak, I can recall the giants of software / computing past - Jeff Minter, Peter Molyneaux, David Braben, Ian Bell, Jim Gregory, David Jones, Jez San etc. (met most of them in my time too!)

Don't really get that now - it's just names of Megacorps with coding teams rather than standout individuals.

Anyone in their 50s still working in a technical job is likely to have reached the top of their pay range in their job grade, with absolutely no chance of promotion, as all the more senior grades are for 'management' (humorously referred to by one Register commentard as "manglement"). They have been passed over, ignored and condescended to by less technically competent, but more managerially astute and ambitious 'grad trainees'. British business simply does not respect technical skills by providing senior technical grades commensurate with senior management grades, but retaining the technical responsibilities.

They have little to no incentive to refresh their skills, based on the fact that most of the courses they attend rarely translate into actual work. ( I attended an ISO2700 Lead Auditor course in my last employment and after that never did any ISO27001 audits again. Previous to that I attended a CRAMM* course, and post that course never did any more CRAMM work, I attended a Business Management Course, and, well you can guess the rest.)

As a 'gentleman of leisure' I feel not the slightest incentive to return to working for anyone at a rate of pay where I could persuade myself I was giving 'value for money'.

*CCTA Risk Analysis and Management Methodology - overtaken by ISO27001.

The other consequence of truncated technical pay scales is that it's assumed that the reward for succeeding in IT (or whatever it might be) will be to be promoted to a managerial scale. This ignores the fact that management is - properly - a skill in it's own right and quite a rare one at that. It makes as much sense as promoting an IT specialist to chemical engineer or vice versa . This is why we have so many abysmal managers that manglement is the most apt term for them.

I am prepared to learn new stuff but we are in the situation that by the time the next generation of software is done I will be retired.

So I will see my days out on our WIN32 system.

But I am helping to design the replacement one!

More the analysis than programmer now

I've worked in IT for about 39 years, and it wasn't my first career, so I'm confident I qualify as a dinosaur. As a contractor, I've had 18 jobs over this period, which I think gives me pretty wide experience of the IT employment environment.

It goes without saying that everybody's always much younger than me. Whether that makes them more flexible or in touch with the latest technologies* is less certain. They're bright and quick, and perhaps they learn faster, but there's no doubt that some are spreading their existing corpus of knowledge very thin. It's depressing and frustrating to see the same mistakes made in one place after another.

I suppose I have my own prejudices. Software engineering offers few opportunities for career advancement apart from promotion out of engineering into some managerial function. A "senior software engineer" is basically just a better-paid code monkey. I tend to view anyone who has been doing much the same job in the same company for many years - the sort of people IBM gets rid of - as lacking enterprise. But that's a typical contractor attitude.

* The latest technologies - popular with suicidally adventurous companies.

'A "senior software engineer" is basically just a better-paid code monkey.'

Sort of yes, but on the other hand, they are also a much wiser monkey who has learned from youthful mistakes and can write better, more reliable, code, better documentation, better prepare a spec, have a better instinct for diagnosing and analysing problems, etc, etc.

I have a fair few current certifications in current or coming technologies and standards. I learn them for my own satisfaction since most of what I do on the job (now again consulting after being an honest worker for while) is recognise issues I've seen before and say what worked and what doesn't and why. That saves younger or less experienced people a lot of wasted time and money.

"And yet, when the BCS looked at the ages of the 1.6 million UK-based IT specialists, it found that just 22 per cent of them were over 50 years old."

Hmmm, how do they know this? If they are basing this on the age cohorts of BCS membership, that's a restricted and self-selecting set, and maybe not representative of actual reality.

Well it is nice to know that we agree on something, ie that there should be more 'mature' personages in technical jobs. But actually I feel there are lots already, they are just not that noticed. Several of the comments on this article are by people who describe themselves as in that age range.

I have to admit to not really liking Ms Weaver much, maybe she reminds me too much of my mother, and sister, both of whom often seem to think that, however little they know of a situation, THEY KNOW BEST. But maybe I do her a disservice.

Troll icon, just in case anyone is tempted to take this post too seriously.

Come on - Jackie rocks!

The cynic in me suspects that "not being on board with the latest tech" actually means "not as excited about the latest fad which looks like something we tried 25 years ago". It's still not a mature industry and the same mistakes keep being made. I mean, we're still screwing up in the ways documented by Fred Brooks in the 70s.

I'm 54 and still programming. Still keeping up with modern practice but I admit to thinking a lot of it is ill thought out and more of a nuisance than it needs to be. I'm just waiting for the next iteration of .NET (.NET ScrewYou perhaps. Or maybe .NET BecauseWeCan). Or hey maybe the much vaunted 64-bit Visual Studio will indeed be twice as fucking awful.

I'm still here because I do like programming (except when I'm fighting VS) and I don't want to let my colleagues down. My retirement plans are in place (funded by never being out of full-time employment for more than a week or three over the last thirty years) and just as soon as the irritation level rises to a critical point I'm off.