Am I old now?

I turn 50 today.

The reason I mention this is because I have seen a lot of people — mostly on LinkedIn — making dire prognostications that anyone over that age will never work in IT again if they're not currently in work, and that gave me pause for thought.

From my mostly passive observation of it at the moment, the job market is somewhat shitty right now.

Part of that is probably because many employers are actively waiting to see if AI is really going to let them get rid of half of their inconveniently expensive human employees while the robots steadily come for our jobs etc. etc. etc.

I am currently in work and not actively looking for something new, but given that my career to date has been completely unplanned and generally guided by a mixture of fate, coincidence, impulsive decisions, and good luck, it does make me consider my viability in the job market for the longer term.

I graduated university 29 years ago, and according to the UK government, I am expected to be capable of work for another 17 years before they give me whatever state pension might still exist then, so unless I get very lucky in the meantime (although my sister did buy me a ticket for the Euromillions draw tonight...) I will have to try to survive the current AI onslaught (and whatever follows it) and remain gainfully employed.

So far I am reasonably optimistic - the robots are still a bit rubbish, the costs of actually running AI at scale while making a profit are starting to show themselves, and I hope that there will still be a place for people like me - namely someone whose brain is wired for problem solving, figuring out how things work (or why they're not working properly), and collaborating with other humans to build and run things that sit in the interface gap between less techy humans and computer systems.

The technologies and the specifics change, but the challenges for me are most often about people and processes - the technology bit we can generally figure out as we go!

Originally posted on LinkedIn