This is not only related to any particular tech company. It seems it is a sad reality that all of a sudden I see fewer and fewer engineers older than 45 around me. Moving to management was not my plan, but I have been testing waters and I have seen my resume turned down for hands on engineering positions. It is shocking. I am afraid it is either management or more layoff risks even for top and motivated individual contributor. Any thoughts?
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Got LR'd but managed to get a new job. Cisco has smart people, but it was slow. SO happy to be out, the severance certainly makes it even better. Words of wisdom: Practice interviewing NOW while you still have a job so you can find one quickly if/when you're laid off.
You lose your skills quickly
always do something on your own time to stay relevant
Istio is hot right now
I sam in the same boat. Got lr-ed begining last year. Started a new job at super company. Can’t say i am super happy but after working at cisco bar is really low. You have to start somewhere. Anyway looking forward to the future and i am constantly educating myself. Learned my lesson.
Good luck and never stop looking elsewhere . Be proactive don’t wait for the axe to fall on your head.
Few Productive replies. Very good. I would add that if one intends to remain employed full-time in high tech companies, how about negotiating with management a semi technical leadership role that could let one code/develop 50% of the time. It was difficult last year since I was working at least 13h/day and in meetings and troubleshooting sessions all day. In the end folks, based on your own reply one thing is certain: in order to remain employable and maintaining a certain income level in high tech after 50, it will require very long hours until the day one retires.
How can you be a strong performer without a performance review?
Here's my reality being on the other side of "mid fifties":
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Seemingly normal interview with a twist, 30 minutes to develop a complete java based application. Got turned down because the application did not have "complete " test cases.
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video interview where the interviewer used his mac to take a picture and things suddenly turned into a lack of sales background needed for the role.
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in-person interview for a developer role for a 7 month coding role, interviewed people without particular programming skills in the language they were looking for but judged me as not being skilled in that language.
Reality is once you reach late 40's to late 50's, there are few companies who will give older workers a "shot" in their wonderful company.
Pretty relevant observation to many OP, more so if you're part of sustenance mode products. In NA region cost cutting measures keep hanging on your head constantly. In APAC region dearth of quality work undermines need for experienced strong performers. That leaves you with option of either getting into management role or become freelancer doing what you cherish doing. Going with management choice needs drastic personality adjustments (with due respect to few excellent management folks) like becoming thick skinned, deceitful towards team, puppets of upper layer. They all have their own well established ecosystem. If these aren't your natural traits (likely as you're still an IC in mid 40s) it will be daunting task to fit in that ecosystem. Have witnessed many people initially opting for it and then going back to IC roles as they preferred to be lesser-paid than more-evil. Second option is more prudent but with different riders. You can choose and pick work that gives you satisfaction plus pays well. There will be waiting period from weeks to months before landing at right assignments. You need to shackle free from fancy-title/steady-income/company-name/social-status etc, but once past that, you'll be at peace with yourself.
I'm in my mid 40s, and here is what I learned post Cisco:
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You MUST be current on in-demand skills. This means you understand at least one cloud, microservices, devops, JavaScript, front-end and/or backend development. Expertise in Cisco technologies won't cut it.
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You MUST do really well on the technical interview. This means practicing algorithms and getting fast at understanding how to solve problems on a whiteboard. You will fail unless you excel at this as college grads are good and fast at this.
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You MUST learn to tailor your resume to meet the position - this is not trivial and will take a day per position, assuming your resume is already great. Learn to emphasize the key parts of your experience and get through the keyword filter.
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You MUST understand the job and company you are interviewing with. If they have principles or a mission statement, tailor STAR interview responses to the top 50 questions. The guys interviewing you are part of a team and you need to convince them you think more like them than their parents. (They had to interview too, likely recently.)
Amazon, for example, is desperate for developers who are good. There is absolutely no trick to getting a good job with them - know java, algorithms, demonstrate the ability to code, give examples of how you fit their culture (they even tell you to study those principles). There is a huge variance in team quality there, but once you do your time at Amazon the world is open.
Facebook? Same thing - but be good at React.
Microsoft = C#/ASP
Google = Java/Go
Apple = Swift/iso
What do you do if you just don't have any experience that matches what you want? Simple - GitHub. Make something, anything, and show it off.
Basically, if you want to compete with those half your age, you have to actually play the game they are and be HUNGRY. (FYI, it is exhausting but unbelievably rewarding when you escape Cisco).
I was expecting a more strategic and intelligent answer.
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