Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 341 posts

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

#81

Post by arenaninja »

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…

Is the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.

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

#82

Post by new_hackers »

angryasian wrote: post #52
new_hackers wrote: post #40

Skills pay the bills. Many of the over-40 crowd I've worked with just plain don't want to learn anything new. They have settled, and are passive in their learning. This is the #1 reason they won't be relevant.

This is the exact attitude that makes tech a shit sector to be in. Its not that people don't want learn anything, its that when you're 40 a lot more time is invested in things outside of work. Kids, wife, house, etc. When you're 20, nomadic, are by yourself, and have a ton of free time.. yes finding time to learn is easy.

... and the medical field, and the law field, and the engineering field. Basically if you want to get premium dollars when trading your skills, you have to have premium skills.

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

#83

Post by emodendroket »

new_hackers wrote: post #40

Skills pay the bills. Many of the over-40 crowd I've worked with just plain don't want to learn anything new. They have settled, and are passive in their learning. This is the #1 reason they won't be relevant.

Experience, architecture/design knowledge, and CS fundamentals are a lot harder to learn than the latest flavor of the month library.

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

#84

Post by ng12 »

angryasian wrote: post #52
new_hackers wrote: post #40

Skills pay the bills. Many of the over-40 crowd I've worked with just plain don't want to learn anything new. They have settled, and are passive in their learning. This is the #1 reason they won't be relevant.

This is the exact attitude that makes tech a shit sector to be in. Its not that people don't want learn anything, its that when you're 40 a lot more time is invested in things outside of work. Kids, wife, house, etc. When you're 20, nomadic, are by yourself, and have a ton of free time.. yes finding time to learn is easy.

A good company will hire people who are not just skilled, but are assets to the work environment. If a company believes after-hours beer pong adds significantly to the happiness and productivity of their employees, whatever. Good for them. I don't think it's unfair of them to not hire somebody who works a strict 9-5, nor do I think that makes the whole industry "shit".

Honestly -- more people work in the 9-5 environment than the Sillicon-Valley brouhaha. You just hear about the brouhaha more because it's a much sexier thing to market.

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

#85

Post by dominotw »

oxryly1 wrote: post #46

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 pe…

I think most younger crowd associates wanting to spend time with family == not motivated to work. See this comment[1] for example( I've been guilty of this myself ).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418289

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

#86

Post by anexprogrammer »

new_hackers wrote: post #40

Skills pay the bills. Many of the over-40 crowd I've worked with just plain don't want to learn anything new. They have settled, and are passive in their learning. This is the #1 reason they won't be relevant.

It's not that they don't want to learn - they can and do.

When you end up with more commitments and some kids home isn't quite as conducive for learning, and spare time is often a distant memory.

I concede there is a (often reasonable in my view) reluctance to rush to learn the 249th new framework that is the future. Especially when it does all the same things as the 134th just with utterly different semantics and libraries. It'll be dead in 4 months and the 250th will be the new hotness.

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

#87

Post by doozy »

shams93 wrote: post #69

Engineering is a dead end job, especially outside of silicon valley. There is 0 respect for experience in the industry, we have more respect for someone who has coded for 2 weeks than someone who continually improves over 25 years. Unless you become a celebrity coder you find that your best choice going forward is suicide. The industry won't let you have a social life or a family once you hit 45 no one cares about yo…

Seek help.

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

#88

Post by oxryly1 »

DonCarlitos wrote: post #57

Try being over 60 & gettind cred. "How could you possibly understand bleeding edge tech and emerging trends?" Well...I've lived there for four decades, you?

Yes, this. And even worse, "I recognize that 'bleeding edge tech' as yet another rehash of something innovated in the 60s or 70s and therefore I'm not nearly as impressed as you by it."

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

#89

Post by api »

oldmanjay wrote: post #5

I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got would help, though.

In my experience older devs really fall into two categories with a pretty sharp division between them.

One group has continued to learn and keep up with their skills. These developers are extremely skilled and experienced and can in many cases be far more productive than younger developers with more shallow knowledge. What they lack in appetite for workaholism they make up for in ability to do more with less work and avoid fads and dead ends. They also tend to have a deep conceptual understanding of the entire stack all the way down to the metal, which younger developers often lack unless they're the super-prodigy type.

The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. When coupled with higher salary demands and less time flexibility, this latter group really are at a huge disadvantage vs. younger developers in the labor market.

Here's the trouble and the source of a lot of the age bias IMHO.

The first group are seasoned black belts and are exactly the kind of devs you want if you are doing seriously deep ground-breaking stuff or if you want quality. In other words if you are really innovating. Ideally you'd probably want a mix of really experienced devs with a lifetime of experience and younger devs that might bring some new perspective, but you'd certainly want at least some of the former on the team to keep the latter from chasing fads and implementing badly thought out junk.

Problem is that most work isn't this. Most work is CRUD-slinging and prototyping and cobbling ready-made modules and services together. That kind of work does not require the deep experience or skill set of the first group.

In other words: seasoned "black belt" developers are over-qualified for most mainstream programming work.

Now throw in the fact that your over-35 developer wants a higher salary, likely has kids and actually wants to see them, etc.

It just makes sense for a lot of shops to recruit cheaper younger developers right out of school who have a lot of time on their hands and who know how to do standard types of work with the latest tools vs. older more expensive developers who know everything and can implement exotic algorithms and close to the metal stuff you probably don't need.

Post reply on HN