I've been looking everywhere. While the ITAA convocation set up a forum to encourage minorities and women to get college degrees and join the pool of newly minted graduates, there was very little talk of retraining or rehiring mid-career workers at the event. Matloff's own research found that, for the most part, companies are unwilling to retrain experienced programmers to fill available slots. A programmer proficient in one language should be able to pick up another in as little as a week, the professor says. Older programmers who pay to retrain themselves are often rejected anyway.
Programming is a young profession.
Six years after finishing a computer science degree, only 57 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers. After 15 years, only 34 percent remain. At 20 years, a mere 19 percent are still working as programmers. Programmers over the age of 50 suffer an astounding 17 percent rate of unemployment, according to one estimate. Even in the supposedly dire shortage of Cobol programmers to tackle the Year 2000 problem, older workers, especially women, are finding their skills to be a hard sell, a recent ComputerWorld column reported.