High tech forsakes veteran workers: Keeping up with the latest gets ever-harder

The Boston Globe reports:

Brewster Smith specialized in mainframe systems for 35 years in the technology industry, recently converting his employer’s mainframe to servers that use newer programming languages. When Smith completed the project in July, his company laid him off because his skills no longer fit the new system.

“It will take at least two years to train you to be productive,’’ he recalled his Concord, N.H., employer telling him. “Why do that when we can just hire someone off the street and they’ll be productive immediately because they know the languages.’’

The high-tech labor market may be on fire, but not for workers like Smith, who haven’t kept up with cutting-edge technology have found that skills that kept them working just a few years ago are no longer in demand. Even as some firms decry a looming labor shortage in the industry, many educated, experienced, and technically savvy workers are finding themselves shut out of the latest tech boom.