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Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#51

Post by dinkumthinkum »

developer1 wrote: post #43
tjradcliffe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the advantages of being older is that it gives one the wisdom to be more selective about tools. I'm an expert in the tools I use (C, C++ and Python, mostly, although I know a dozen-odd languages well enough to crash a program in them) and not hugely keen on learning new ones. I poke around at new languages now and then but quickly learn they are either a) so much like ones I know there's nothing specia…

The editor thing can be kind of important. People who stick with emacs or vim tend to be horrible with following coding standards and being able to review and navigate code efficiently. There's nothing like an editor from Jetbrains for tooling (Eclipse works too, but seriously the Jetbrains line is the best). I have never used emacs, but vim is horribly limited in what it can truly do in terms of handling code. You c…

This is kind of ridiculous. You are indicting vim and emacs users for some alleged major catastrophe at your organization. You realize very large and well written software projects, probably my h larger than your's, have been built by people using vim and emacs and not having JetBrains did not hamper them.

Honestly, I have seen so many developers fumbling around with their "intellisense" and the kinda of things you are talking about, it makes me sleepy watching them. I feel like if only spent time learning how to program than their code completion and refactoring tools, they might produce better, more efficient work.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#52

Post by dinkumthinkum »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #12

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older people that learned Pascal in 1978 and never stepped outside of their comfort zone. We have an older person working in our office that, if it wasn't for him would practically be a zoo. He constantly schools us on all things tech, and keeps everyone in line. You a…

The other side to that is that there are plenty of younger developers that don't know how to use timers in Javascript or know what the CPU cache is.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#53

Post by arisAlexis »

I'd like to express a somewhat different view while being in the same boat. I am 35 and working as a dev for years now. My recent teammates (small team) include a senior very experienced developer who started coding with punch cards for the British gov. That seemed cool at first but now I am trying to maintain some software he wrote from 2004-now. The software has really bad code in it, the kind you wouldn't expect some experienced guy to produce. It has no testing, it has serious OO flaws. Maybe its this particular guy that was just not very good, but its creeping me out when we talk about things and I realise he is comprehending much slower than the rest. I was wondering if that's just normal age degradation. I would love to code 40 years from now. I am just worried.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#54

Post by dinkumthinkum »

hawkice wrote: post #2

My advice is to play up the experience, but play down some details of that experience. For instance, 40 years of COBOL and C++ has some signalling issues (not completely unreasonably, what with carpenters blaming shoddy tools). I'd probably not talk about the technical nature of the experience at all -- just say the industry it was for and what the tool was used for, and not name-dropping old technologies. Also, outs…

I doubt anyone has 40 years of C++ .... But that's part of the point here. I think a lot of what people are saying is junk. If you want to work as some hipster startup for low pay, there is a high probability that they are looking for you to talk about web framework du jour. However, there are plenty of adults working at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and thousands of smaller companies that last longer than three years ...

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#55

Post by pcthrowaway »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #47
BorisMelnik wrote: post #12

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older people that learned Pascal in 1978 and never stepped outside of their comfort zone. We have an older person working in our office that, if it wasn't for him would practically be a zoo. He constantly schools us on all things tech, and keeps everyone in line. You a…

Reminds me of someone who refused to use revision control because "merges were unreliable". Of course they are when you wait 30 days between commits.

Git noob question here (but someone who has been working on that noobishness for a year now): Can't you just rebase the branch you're on before trying to merge to another branch?

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#56

Post by cafard »

inmyunix wrote: post #28
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flipside, I've personally witnessed a manager firing someone just because he was old. There is an ageism problem in the industry. Like racism or sexism, whether you see its effects depends on where you are.

surely there was more to the story. hard to believe it was only attributable to age without some context.

I saw that happen to my father and a number of his co-workers (scientists and engineers) at a mining company forty years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#58

Post by fecak »

chvid wrote: post #24
fecak wrote: post #8

Recruiter here. I would absolutely recommend you not include any obvious indicators of age on your resume, at least in many parts of the country. Graduation dates are not required, and perhaps your first few jobs can be eliminated from the resume. A resume doesn't have to be a complete biography. With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more…

Hi recruiter - in what age/level of experience does "discrimination" come in and one should start to "trim" the number of years?

In my experience, that might be dependent upon where you are in the country, the leadership of a company, pre-determined notions and biases (likely unfounded) about the ability of older workers to keep up with trends, and the relative age of the employees you will be working with.

In the startup world (nationwide/worldwide maybe), ageism might be equated with "likely to have a family and commitments to prevent he/she from working longer hours than are typically expected". If that person writes "single, no kids, open to 60 hours per week" (and I'm not suggesting they should) on a cover letter, being 50 years old might not be an issue.

I usually recommend trimming jobs when they become irrelevant. Working on systems in the 1970's and 80's will show you have a foundation of knowledge that dates back through computing history, but I'd usually recommend trimming those types of things off (or at least limiting to them as "previous experience" entries with little content).

There is usually no reason to trim experience before you turn 40 these days, though as technology changes quicker that could become lower. The things most people did 15 years ago likely still have some relevance. 25 years might be another story.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#59

Post by old-soft-man »

Great discussion here, although so much of it presumes that people whose hiring prowess mistakes CV crafting skills for CS wisdom are worth working for.

Okay, I'm lucky to be at a point where I squeezed enough blood from the software development rock to carry on even if I never wrote another line of code again.

But I can hardly express how much happier I've been in a (relative to "rock star" and/or "ninja" mindsets) silly, part time "data specialist" position for a local non-profit that really needs someone who can spin useful utilities and disparate systems connectivity from any available silk (or dirty kite string) than I've ever been slaving away in the usual "headless chickens" environments managed by the usual clowns whose management training consisted of little more than proving themselves useless at software development itself - which training, of course, tends to result in the aforementioned hiring prowess to boot.

Good bleeping riddance!

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#60

Post by fecak »

mjones wrote: post #20
fecak wrote: post #8

Recruiter here. I would absolutely recommend you not include any obvious indicators of age on your resume, at least in many parts of the country. Graduation dates are not required, and perhaps your first few jobs can be eliminated from the resume. A resume doesn't have to be a complete biography. With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more…

Hi Recruiter, I appreciate the value of what you have said but I wonder whether the deception by omission would count against me in the case that I get as far as the face-to-face interviews. Thanks! ps. The 40 years includes only the years I was paid. Prior to that I spent about a year learning how to program.

It depends on how much you omit. If you omit the last 35 years and your graduation date, you show up with the expectation of a 27 year old where you are likely in your 50s. That might be considered deceptive.

Graduation dates are usually the biggest issue, as older workers tend to drop their first jobs off the resume just to save space. So if your first listed job was in 1995, people will assume you are about 42 (we assume first job around 22 years old). But if you include a graduation date of 1985, we now know you are 52. So a graduation date makes a major difference there.

You can probably overcome any personal ethical issues by calling your experience section "relevant experience" if necessary. I personally don't find that necessary, as I don't think anyone has the right to assume a resume must contain every professional activity. Resumes from foreign countries often include photos, birthdates, and marital status, which is not recommended in the US (by employers or candidates).

Don't trim off too much - you want them to value your experience. But trim just enough where you are keeping most of the relevant work without sharing unnecessary and potentially unhelpful content.

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