> Are you saying even today you're unemployable?

Likely. Maybe Wal-Mart would hire me to stock shelves. In computing, essentially unemployable and have been since 1994. Long time.

Ah, along the way, I heard of a guy and several of his buddies who had, from a sudden change in some banking laws, found a hot resource allocation problem and, supposedly, some eager high end customers -- big banks. They had formulated the problem as a large 0-1 integer linear programming problem but gave up on using a linear programming package. So, they tried simulated annealing. They ran for days, quit when tired, took the best solution they'd found, and called it done without much information about how far they were from optimality. They mailed me their 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. I looked at it, thought I saw a path forward with some non-linear duality theory (in some senses, amazing stuff), did some derivations, the told them that I'd have a little in a few days and all of it in about two weeks. I did. I typed in Fortran code so that for some of the work I could call the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library for linear programming, callable from a certain Watcom Fortran compiler I had. My code ran right away. On their test problem 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables, all 0-1, on a slow computer I got a feasible solution the duality said was within 0.025% of optimality in 905 seconds. I wrote them back with the good news but never heard from them again. There was something about they were just going on vacation. Uh, the guy who had done the simulated annealing work wasn't thrilled that I might work on the problem. They had paid me nothing, so I wrote letters to the candidate banks and heard back nothing.

There was another, similar case: The problem was the old one of which pharmaceutical salesmen should go to which physicians and leave what samples. Surprisingly I found a network integer linear programming formulation -- there get integer programming for free. I was writing the code in portable Fortran, since that seemed to be the effective approach, when a guy in the company who had an old heuristic wanted to get rid of me, and did.

Agism is a lot of it.

IMHO, broadly a CIO wants a lot of worker bees age 20 - 35 and manager bees older. As worker bees approach age 35, a tiny fraction are promoted into management and the rest fired. No way do they want to hire worker bees over 40; certainly not at 45, never but never at 50. The above is broad but IMHO roughly the situation.

Really, a guy 20 would be better off starting a grass mowing service, with one lawn mower, grow the business to several mowers, trucks, and crews, expand into landscape architecture and commercial clients, and by age 35 own a nice business he could keep running as long as his health held out and pass the business down to his children. Just grass mowing.

Or, a guy in computing at age 30 should think seriously about being founder of a startup. No, call that age 25 -- heck, call it age 20.

I'm no longer looking for a salaried job in computing and, instead, am concentrating on my startup.

I was pleasant enough a person early in my a career when I could get a better job anytime in two weeks. Now my skills with people are much better.

IMHO, being a worker bee in computing is a long walk on a short pier. The field might be a profession like law, medicine, or some fields of engineering, but is not. So, there's next to nothing in professional certification, government licensing, professional peer review, legal liability, etc. From all I've seen, nursing works out better -- can continue to be a worker bee level nurse as long as can do the work. School teaching is better once get something like tenure.

I don't know how to solve the problem except just to leave it and, as in my case, do a startup. I can still do computing -- my startup software with 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing seem to work as intended, and I did it all from the first glimmer of an idea to the current alpha test. But that cuts no ice with any employer.

Ah, yes, now there is data science: Gee, I have experience and an applied math Ph.D. from one of the world's best research universities that makes nearly all of current data science look like baby talk. But, that cuts no ice, either.

I've got my startup. My wife died in 1992 from stresses from her Ph.D., and I'm about to get a kitty cat!

I'm fine, but I looked hard for jobs from about 1992, for years -- a huge waste -- and now just want to do my startup. So, the startup will be just a Web site, and the users need know nothing about me. If there are a lot of happy users, then there will be a lot of happy advertisers, and I will do well financially. That's what I'm doing.