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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 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?
Edit to add: At a former company i became a bit of an outsider when I noted at a diversity meeting that diversity meant more than the big 3 that tend to get pushed around Gender, Orientation, Race. I noted that our office was young, had no parents, no ex convicts, no disabled people, few people who had not attended a top university (or no university for that matter) and few or no religious people... people basically said "Why you against ?" as though it was some kind of zero sum fight.
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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 f…
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... 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.
What I've experienced is that many of the tech managers either 1) couldn't hack it to begin with, so they pivoted (this pivot may have been in college, or in the workforce), or 2) haven't stayed relevant themselves.
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.…
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Tell that to all the COBOL programmers making serious money.
COBOL is tied to specialized hardware that's hard to move away from due to massive capital investment. PHP will run anywhere better languages run. And really, COBOL will be gone someday. If your career is on the line, it pays to stay current.
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?
The assumption that we're slower, out dated and unwilling to put the hours in is kinda prejudicial. Some of us may be, but TBH I see a lot of foolishness, wasted time and nonsense from some younger people too. Enthusiasm and Wisdom are BOTH valuable. A trait that might be more common in one age group is not justification for rejecting the entire age group.
But the hiring processes are totally discriminatory. I've been on the other side of it too often, seen bosses reject people younger than me as "too old" without even realizing it (or that they are creating cause for a discrimination lawsuit.)
Last time I interviewed with bay area startups I had a %100 correllation-- visual interviews (eg: skype video etc) would not progress, even past the HR initial contact (eg: no technical interview at all) while ones done via audio (no visual) would progress. (I guess I don't look as young as I think I do!) We're talking well known companies like Digital Ocean and Stripe engaged in straight up age discrimination.
After being discriminated against by Pebble a few years ago, I figured they were the exception (The guy who interviewed me was so young and so incompetent the he had the wrong answers for his trick questions and couldn't grasp my explanations, which the HR lady reported to me as "you need to get stronger on these things")... but the most recent round convinced me that it really is discrimination.
I've got a lot of really valuable talents and relevant as I've stayed current. I interview very well- typically I can get a better job than I deserve by interviewing. I've been rejected lots over my career, sometimes just arbitrarily. I never would have thought that I was being discriminated against except that I noticed the correlation between visual interviews (and I'm certain that 5 years ago when I was rejected I was not being discriminated against.)
Further, as a sexual minority, I had to deal with the possibility years ago that I would be fired if people found out. I decided that this was fine-- I don't want to work for a place that discriminates against me. I can make money on my own if I need to, I don't need a job.
So it's no big deal. I'm just surprised at how poorly so many companies do it. And of course, I do tend to stop being a customer of companies that engage in discrimination. (That's me discriminating against them. :-)
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On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.
My theory: they taste like pine trees, and we've got a lot of pine trees, so it just feels right. Try drinking an IPA in Mexico sometimes. Super inappropes. But in PNW it makes sense. For awhile, til you get sick of it.
I think theres also regional hop variations, so maybe theyre just less piney here.
Perspective is what the Valley needs if ageism is an issue, because we aren't getting younger.
Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.
But the cohort of people who were influenced in college in the dot com days to go into tech and started graduating from college in the early 2000's is large. And so the cohort of people above a certain age is growing large, and if you actually discriminate against all that talent you will end up giving an advantage to the people who do not discriminate as they will have a better pool of people to choose from to hire.
Going to be an interesting decade.