It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#41

Post by sjclemmy » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

It might be like that in SV. It doesn't feel that way where I live. I'm 44 and do Front end dev, which I taught myself after being a project manager / Business analyst for a good 10 years. I do live in what might be considered a backwater in England, but I get enquirers almost daily about my availability.

Also - I read about Shel Kaphan the other day - employee #1 at Amazon - he must have been in his 40s when he started there if he was studying in 1975. Obviously his age didn't deter Jeff Bezos.

I've worked in places where older employees become irrelevant to the business because they get stuck in their ways and don't want to / can't change. If you're not prepared to re-skill, or you think your job is safe - you're in for a rough time if someone else controls your destiny. That's not to say people don't get badly treated by organisations - they do, and that's wrong. But still, working life is a struggle and a balancing act.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#42

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #14

The best explanation I've seen for this is when you're a young engineer with little experience showing knowledge of a framework or technique is a huge plus. For someone with a ton of experience not knowing something is shown as a minus. For interview processes trying to avoid false positives a negative mark will hurt you much more in the final sum. So the bar is set differently for two candidates applying to the same…

> So the bar is set differently for two candidates applying to the same position.

Because employers expect and accept that hiring people straight out of college is a lemon market. But by the time people reach fifty, the expectation is that you can identify the lemons.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#43

Post by DigitalJack » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #13

I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average. The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for wha…

Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer.

Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#44

Post by aliston » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

anexprogrammer wrote: post #31

tn13 wrote: post #3

Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.

That should have happened long ago. I did CS and programming as high school subjects and am past 50. The tens of thousands of extra people trained up to solve the millenium bug crisis (that mostly didn't happen) are probably around 40 now. Of my tech friends around my age a lot have drifted into other things - often dramatically different. Some because they were sick of IT (often for similar reasons), and some becaus…

For us younger, but not quite so young folks... what sorts of things have they gone into? Would you say that there is a general trend, or are they all over the map?

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#45

Post by new_hackers » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

refractiveco wrote: post #37

boto3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amen to that, older engineers would require higher salaries (due to the need to support family, to pay mortgage, etc.), and would not be able to put in the same number of hours. So if you can't demonstrate that you provide more values than the younger guns, why would an employer want to hire older engineers?

In theory the more experience you have the fewer hours you would need to put in. You've solved all the common problems engineers face 10 times before.

This.

I've found the need to be a 60+ hour hero means that you don't really know what you are doing.

The guy who goes home early on Fridays, that is the guy who knows his stuff.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#46

Post by oxryly1 » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

Is this perhaps because older workers gravitate towards sane hours? Maybe because they develop interests, lives, families, etc outside of work that they commit to (moreso than most 20-somethings)?

As a side note: I'm over 40 now, but I do recall being 27 and interviewing someone in their early 40s who was qualified and enthusiastic. I passed on them in part because I felt guilty hiring them; to work on my team the person would have to move their family to a new city, and I didn't want the karma of bringing that many people into a world where the team/project I was on was staffed and led by 20-somethings -- and therefore chaotic and unlikely to survive long in any particular form.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#47

Post by ksk » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #43

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #13

I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average. The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for wha…

Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.

On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#48

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #13

I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average. The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for wha…

That's a shame, I like WinForms, JQuery and PHP.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#49

Post by tapmap » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

This is such bullshit. There are no limits on entrepreneurship and the age at which you can start a business, which is what drives real growth and value in Silicon Valley. Sure, if you want to be a wage slave to some other company, and help someone else achieve their dreams, go ahead and work for another company, and get discriminated against because of your grey hair.

Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

#50

Post by tetrep » Thu, Sep 08, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #26

jwr wrote: post #12

This is idiotic. People over 40 trade one set of skills for another (source: I'm over 40). You lose short-term memory, can't juggle too many things simultaneously, and aren't always up to date on every latest fad. But what you gain is fantastically valuable: intuition, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to detect patterns in large systems, ability to notice that certain problems have been solved in a differ…

intuition, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to detect patterns in large systems, ability to notice that certain problems have been solved in a different field, and lots more. Basically, you become a pattern matching database of non-obvious cost/benefit trade-offs.

> Basically, you become a pattern matching database of non-obvious cost/benefit trade-offs.

What some might call "experience." What makes problem solving skills valuable is the ability for the wielder to pattern match effectively. The more problem patterns you can positively match to solution patterns, the more valuable your experience. To a lesser extent, simply being able to identify problem patterns is also very valuable, as if you can avoid the creation of a problem it doesn't matter if you know a solution to it (I don't know how to escape a black hole, so I generally avoid them when traveling in space).