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Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

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Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#171

Post by OutOfHere »

carlosjobim wrote: post #151
OutOfHere wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. There are supposed to be dedicated pre-scheduled staff for it. If a storm is forecasted, the power companies have staff already waiting in trucks, ready to go anywhere in their designated zones. They are getting double or triple pay for it too if it's outside regular hours. Do not make the mistake of confusing it with waking someone up.

I know people who work with this stuff and are home on-call (and paid for that). A forecast is never 100% accurate? Very few people prefer to sit waiting in a truck for nothing to happen, rather than being on-call in their cozy home with their family.

Getting paid for that PER INCIDENT is important. If I got paid $1000 per incident when on-call, I would accept it. This amount is significant enough for management to develop processes to really avoid people getting paged, and that is the point.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#172

Post by mixmastamyk »

segmondy wrote: post #162
mixmastamyk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chase my tail a lot less (with failed refactorings) these days. Can’t help but be much faster than when I did. Tortoise vs. hare.

I think the challenge is that software is rarely baked in these days, if they can find themselves in a slow moving enterprise environment, most will be fine, but if they are in a "modern" day shop that's always chasing the new shiny framework and library then it's a struggle.

If folks are telling you that’s dumb, maybe they’re on to something. Or if company has money to burn it could be fun.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#173

Post by rootnod3 »

tasuki wrote: post #145
rootnod3 wrote: post #22

I would wager that it will get better soon. Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down and a few years of junior developers went down the drain untrained and unmentored, the demand for experienced seasoned developers will rise again. This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one w…

> Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down Excuse me?

Remember the first AI winter? I could also ask "excuse me?!" about the usage of LLMs.

Give the whole thing 5-10 years until the impact of juniors learning nothing and having the perseverance and attention span of about 10 minutes and the effects will show in the industry. Yes, LLMs + agents have value here and there, but remember on where they get that value from: they learn from the internet. And papers already show that if LLMs learn from their own output, the quality degrades quickly.

So, more code written by LLMs on Github equals subsequent generations for LLMs learn from subpar examples.

Furthermore, they mostly learn from "en vogue" languages because they have lots of examples. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with a 10 foot pole doing Lisp or Cobol or any RTOS related C code with safety requirements.

I wouldn't trust an LLM to write a proper GPU or CUDA driver. But if there's nobody around knowing how to do that, how do you expect future drivers to be implemented?

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#174

Post by jocaal »

drillsteps5 wrote: post #132
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #23

I think most of the ostensible age discrimination is explained by the tech industry's massive growth over the past 50 years (means more young people are hired than old people because they have the skills).

As well as overproduction of CS grads in the last 10/15 years. Much like law grads a generation earlier. Wonder who's next, MDs perhaps?..

Not a chance for MD's. MD's are the only degree where jobs are guaranteed, but graduation is not. They will always have a shortage.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#175

Post by muzani »

softwaredoug wrote: post #44

I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know bet…

I've had more trouble with other ICs rather than leaders.

It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.

When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."

I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.

It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.

I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#176

Post by bjourne »

softwaredoug wrote: post #44

I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know bet…

Isn't the fact that you hide your age evidence that you suspect ageism? Fwiw, I do the same.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#177

Post by blindriver »

p1dda wrote: post #169
blindriver wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, pursue it as a hobby but don't try to make a career out of it. This is the worst hiring environment I've seen since the dotcom bust, and there are tens of thousands of fresh CS grads that are unemployed. If you want to go to school because you're interested, then that's cool. But to think you can make a living out of it when you're 30 years older than the tens of thousands of kids that you're competing agai…

Thank you for your insight about the hiring environment! What are your thoughts about getting involved in an open-source project or something else to get some more experience?

definitely go for it, it's a great way to get recognition. However, it's a terrible way to learn because getting a mentor to teach you how to make changes will be very tough. But if you can, it's great because it's real work and real code changes.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#178

Post by quintes »

I am a senior architect with plenty of years behind me, and I can say that as an IC some senior managers love me and some hate me. I will say there is a skew here and sometimes i think the dogs think it’s a turf war. I provide advice and guidance, advisory and technical leadership and it is interesting how sometimes these aren’t received well and the receiver will do what they want. Which makes it interesting because I give advice and then they don’t actually want it.

I’m also older and stand up for myself. This is not without its own troubles.

I am however thinking about what the next 20 years are gonna look like career, location and opportunity wise as I can see some challenges ahead where I live

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#179

Post by torginus »

major505 wrote: post #111
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts. In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons). The prejudice from younger folks is cul…

Thats why, me at 40`s, now am I working in a german auto industry where they still got more traditional views and p promote people with time inside the company. Hip companies dont hire me, maybe some tech consultants, that would not be considered cool, like accenture or IBM. A few years ago I was one of the first people in my country tomigrate my company android app to Kotlin, this helped me land in the app developme…

That's why ageism is stupid - in my experience age is uncorrellated with technical chops and productivity, with people who actually know their stuff and care about the job they're doing coming from every possible age bracket.

One of the most productive guys and all around technical wizard I know is a father of 3 in his 40s.

I do know a few people straight out of college who are rather excellent devs, but the problem with a lot of them them is that they have inflated egos and don't take feedback at at all, and/or they move around a lot.

Imagine building up a guy who works like crazy with a huge body of knowledge, then he's out of the company the next year, and nobody knows what any of his code does.

Re: Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

#180

Post by torginus »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #12

In my sub-field (embedded systems), I don't see it. There are companies that see the value of 40 years of experience. (And there are plenty that don't...) But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.

I did a lot of microcontroller and FPGA stuff in college a decade ago (and most of the stuff like Verilog and Cortex chips or RTOSes weren't exactly new then), but since then have drifted away from the field - I tried to get back into it as a hobby, and checked out what's new, and it seems to me that surprisingly has changed.
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