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You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

nytimes.com

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Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#251

Post by jonnathanson »

teuobk wrote: post #35
hirundo wrote: post #8

I'm a grey beard who applied to a company specifically advertising for young developers. Got the job without mentioning my vintage. That was six years ago and they still haven't seen my face. I waited a while to gently break the news to them. If you're a technological senior citizen remote work is your friend.

How did they "specifically advertise for young developers" without running afoul of age discrimination laws?

Generally speaking, there's nobody out there proactively enforcing antidiscrimination laws. The enforcement pathway is reactive. You get penalized for discrimination (in theory) when someone you've discriminated against brings legal action against you.

In this case, someone would have to sue them. For instance, an older developer who interviews, believes he or she is being discriminated against on the basis of age, and uses the advertisement as further evidence in the complaint.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#252

Post by cableshaft »

philsnow wrote: post #54
jlarocco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your age or birth date probably shouldn't be on your CV. Unless you think it's relevant to the job somehow, but it probably isn't. Not only should it not matter, but it's illegal for employers to ask about it or consider it in their hiring decision, so having it right there on your CV puts them in a bit of a tight spot. I think some recruiters will actually remove that type of thing before forwarding it on to the int…

Many people put college graduation year on their resume, and hiring managers reflexively subtract ~20 from that year and aren't wrong 99% of the time.

One of the few perks of not finishing your degree until much later is the fact that you can put that date on your resume and people assume you're younger. It's expensive, though, considering how much and how fast college tuition has been shooting up in price the past 15 years.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#254

Post by cafard »

jbuzbee wrote: post #203
WalterBright wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc. I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!

Does anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!

I certainly do. I found even punch cards preferable. The awkwardness of the input method meant that I stayed away from tech for almost 15 years after the first quarter of my freshman year in college.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#255

Post by th0waway »

ourmandave wrote: post #48
newjersey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms. And I am relatively young.

We do a lot of new development in Winforms. Ironically, it's our migration path away from green screen programs.

I've never really understood the problem with green screen programs: for most businesses, a green screen is perfectly usable, and it has the added bandwidth of low bandwidth requirements. A company I worked for uses Windows apps hosted in a Citrix environment. A green screen would lower the bandwidth requirements and remove a lot of the parasitic drag between servicing the customer and storing data.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#256

Post by th0waway »

mark-r wrote: post #232
ourmandave wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales. As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc." Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference! I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(

They prefer the young ones, because it's easier to get them to swallow the BS. They'll play the "fire and motion" game [1] with gusto. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

yeah, the young ones have spent the last several years distancing themselves from everything the old man has done, that doing anything that the old man does is seen as regressive. They don't want to do it the way the old man does until they ARE the old man.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#257

Post by seizethecheese »

mark-r wrote: post #244
seizethecheese wrote: post #92

Lots of folks commenting here on there not being many older developers around. Well considering there are at least 10x more developers now than there were 30 years ago, and people generally get into it when they're young, this is completely expected.

It's not about age distribution, it's about the obstacles you encounter when you're older. Even if it's only a desire by that younger majority to be around people who are just like them.

My point is that the distribution of developer ages at your work place is not an indication of age-discrimination, not that age-discrimination doesn't exist.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#258

Post by bbcbasic »

ekiara wrote: post #246
bbcbasic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or hire remote, smart, Haskell developers from cheap countries.

Is there a market for remote Haskell developers? I've found a pretty distinct lack of functional developer jobs in my region. Though I was surprised to find a local software company that has specifically recruited several Clojure developers.

That's part of the joke. Lots of devs keen to do Haskell, so market forces reduce the pay of such jobs, especially if they are not expert in nature (typical back/front end stuff). Yet you get someone who took the time to learn Haskell.

I watched some great videos from India Haskell meetups, which gives me the impression you can go to one of those and get "cheaper" developers. Not saying they'll work for odesk rates but certainly could be cheaper than a cubicaled SF worker.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#259

Post by ido »

Accacin wrote: post #183
ido wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also customary in Germany, although I've never had a problem getting a job and I've never attached a photo to my resume.

Really? That seems very odd to me. In the UK I've never put my birth date, gender or photo on a CV and you're advised not to, unless you're applying to be like a model or something where I guess gender and photo is needed.

Immigration is still a pretty new thing for most of central Europe.

There weren't a significant number of visibly-foreign immigrants in Germany till the 60s or 70s and it took a couple more decades before those were seen as anything other than 'temporary guest workers'.

The UK and France (and even more so the US and other "New World" countries) had at least a few decades head-start for culture to get around the idea of immigration.

Re: You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

#260

Post by gaius »

animal531 wrote: post #250
gaius wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because your devs didn't write them in stored procs like they should.

Only roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.

So you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.
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