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Submission + - IT career path after 35?

An anonymous reader writes: All my friends seem to be moving towards a managerial role, and I'm concerned about my increasing age in a business where, according to some, 30 might as well be 50.
But I still feel young, and feel like I have so much to learn. So many interesting technical challenges cross my path, as I manage to move towards larger and more complex projects. I am in higher demand than ever, often with multiple headhunters contacting me in the same day. But will it last?
Is age discrimination a myth? Are there statistics on how many IT people move into management? I know some older programmers who got bored with management and successfully resumed a tech-only career. Others started their own small business.
What has been your experience? Do you/have you assumed a managerial role? Did you enjoy it? Have you managed to stay current and marketable long after 35?

Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 276

Pretty sure if you look at a map you will see that the vast majority of our discoveries were ON THE WAY to China, haha, or entirely in the opposite direction, across the Atlantic Ocean :)
Like, you know, the entirety of Africa, India, and Brazil? :)
We certainly didn't discover the Bering Strait or anything up north. Beyond China, we went to Japan and Indonesia and that's about it.

Comment Re:Or not. (Score 1) 116

I have a publicly accessible timeline (you do know that privacy settings are per-post, right?), where I post things like inspirational quotes, and write about the value of hard work, and things that I believe a prospective employer might be interested in. I do post stuff as "friends-only" and designate some people as "acquaintances". In general, on or off the internet, I do not traffic in subjectivity. I have better things to do than pontificate about politics or the controversy du jour. Idle coffee shop philosophizing is for those without the trained mind of a scientist. The truth is knowable, stop speculating and look it up :)
I have been contacted by prospective employers via Facebook, actually. The highest-paid job I ever had was from an old Facebook friend who started his own business.

Comment Stock is not money. (Score 1) 712

You have no guarantee of deriving any value from a payment made in stock. As per TFA Schmidt's stock vests in 4 years. In 4 years, he might not even be alive. Google's stock value could drop 1000% (dot com bust, anyone?). And you can certainly not sell immense amounts of stock in one go, or you'll drive the price down.

Comment Re:And It's Our Fault (Score 1) 135

Nooo! Radioactive waste is warm, it would melt the ice ;)
You could pump the water out and allow it to freeze on the surface. Cover the damn thing with solar panels - less sun to reach the surface and melt the ice.
Water usually falls through cracks and lubricates the ground beneath the glaciers.
If we can remove the water maybe they won't slide into the ocean, and won't raise sea levels?

Comment Re:Anthropic Principle (Score 4, Interesting) 312

Yes. There would have been a lot more stars blowing up right in your vicinity, but more importantly, the newly-formed heavy elements would have been naturally accompanied by their usual radioactive isotopes, but why bother a physicist with the laws of biology, eh? :)
It is commonly thought that life evolved when it did because it's the time it took for radioactive elements to decay.

Of course, ratios of radioactive to stable isotopes vary from place to place, depending on which star blew up to create them and how old it was. But you can't really say the whole universe was a goldilocks zone. It would have taken a special place with more than just water - and the oldest galaxy we know of is 380 million years old. And let's not forget that 15 million old Earth was just a giant ball of magma... constantly being hit by giant asteroids. The Hadean period (Hades = the ancient greek version of Hell) is thought to have lasted about 600 million years.

I doubt a 15 million year old universe would have been little more than atomic soup. Water may have existed, but not as we know it. It takes more than 15 million years for a star to form and blow up, where would you have gotten enough heavy elements for a planet to arise? :)
The first stars are thought to have formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, not 15. Dude's on crack.

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