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It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

bloomberg.com

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

#121

Post by angryasian »

new_hackers wrote: post #82
angryasian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All those other fields value experience very highly. Software engineering is the only field that doesn't care what you've worked on in the past or what you've done. They only care about what trick algorithm that you will never utilize that you can answer on a white board.

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

#122

Post by falsestprophet »

albertop wrote: post #77
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.

So when you talk about women in computing industry, you advice them to get a good professional headshot?

In many European countries it is expected to include a photo with a CV.

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

#123

Post by rb808 »

I come from a family with a few generations of engineers of all types.

Mechanical/chemical/electrical engineers have a similar problem that 30 years experience isn't much more useful than 10, wages tend to top out early and you're vulnerable to being laid off and never hired again in your 40s/50s. One advantage over software is that the skills change perhaps less frequently but that is offset by lower overall demand.

While you're in your 20's think about what you're going to do at the end of your 20 year window. Are you moving up to management? Have extensive business knowledge to add to tech skills? Have a second career planned? Or saved enough money to retire or semi-retire? Of course you can actively stay up to date with latest technology but that is much tougher than it sounds. You need to have thought a lot about this before you hit 40.

For all the young guys out there. Don't think it wont happen to you. If you just follow day by day one day you'll wake up with a big mortgage, a couple of expensive kids, maybe a divorce and a bunch of recruiters that never return your phone calls. You need to avoid that place.

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

#124

Post by donretag »

wcummings wrote: post #67
DigitalJack wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.

I keep on thinking that surely this hops fad will die out soon, but it keeps on increasing. The West coast is especially big on hops. Even lagers from breweries like Lagunitas are extremely hoppy. No thank you. Hops are a cheap and easy way to disguise the taste of bad beer.

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

#125

Post by SapphireSun »

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.

The reason IPA is so popular is because for so long the american beer landscape was dominated by brews like Budwiser that are quite weakly flavored. This was an artifact of prohibition destroying most of the competitive landscape with the survivors dominating the market for decades and in turn using anticompetitive laws to their advantage.

IPA is a reaction against that flavor profile. You'll be starting to see new flavors come about as people (like yourself) become tired of IPAs.

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

#126

Post by angryasian »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #78
angryasian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is your point. The job market is not meant to cater to people's specific changes in work/life preferences. This is almost analogous to complaining about construction being ageist against older people who don't keep in shape. Yeah guess what, you need to in order to do the work.

I'm sorry but even if you know the ins and outs of language or a framework, it still doesn't matter if you do poorly on white board questions. As much as everyone says "its to see your thinking process". Nothing you've worked on in the past or have experienced matters.

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

#127

Post by mywittyname »

exstudent2 wrote: post #112
gburt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.

Relational dbs sure, but there are legitimate scale reasons to use a distributed key value store (for instance). There is no reason to be stuck with PHP today though. It's a very backward language when you compare to something with a modern type system/features (e.g. Go, Rust, Clojure, Java 8+, Scala...). Devs need to have a passion for learning technology. Not because it's the shiny new thing but because the new tec…

Often times you have no control over the technology stack you use because other factors drive your choices. I'm stuck developing in PHP because the tool we are using is written in PHP.

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

#128

Post by logfromblammo »

JasonCEC wrote: post #92
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…

Ouch man.... not all craft beer software is BS CRUD apps overbuilt on react.js by 22 year old hipsters deploying single function "micro-services" each in their own docker container... Brewing beer is a form of manufacturing, and most manufacturing can be made better or more efficient though targeted software. [0] commenting because I don't want "craft beer software" to become a joke. Some of us actually work in that…

How about we qualify that instead as "craft-beer-advertising software"?

Monitoring the temperature and pressure of your fermentation vessels securely from any commodity mobile device would be productive and useful.

Figuring out how to re-skin the collect-and-compete RPG game genre onto all the different flavors of HoppyHipsterBeard-brand beers seems to be the sort of thing grandparent post was referring to.

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

#129

Post by donretag »

albertop wrote: post #107

I find it fascinating that when there is a discussion about age discrimination, most commenters have "advice" for the old farts how to stay current, learn current hip tech, be willing to work longer hours etc. However, we we talk about women in computing, it is always sexism and the discussion is about how the corporations need to change to attract more women. Pretty asymmetrical, don't you think?

My company is undergoing a big diversity initiative. Although the company is 75% female, the first task to is increase the number of women in tech. Race is also a factor. When asked about what is being done about age discrimination, there was a roundabout answer that did not address anything. Age diversity is not trendy.

EDIT: I should clarify that I have nothing against the diversity initiative in general, just pointing how despite all the work that is/was done, age discrimination was not even considered.

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