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Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

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Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#141

Post by groby_b »

20yrs_no_equity wrote: post #138
tentakull wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in SV, quite honestly the best member of my team is >40 (I'm in my late 20's). I don't understand ageism at all, experience really makes the job easier and I value that wealth of knowledge as a more junior dev

The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at…

> while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it

It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor")

Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here)

All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#142

Post by mattdeboard »

sjdchid wrote: post #57
whamlastxmas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".

Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief.

There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year).

Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.

So maybe just tone it down.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#143

Post by collyw »

zwieback wrote: post #63
vemv wrote: post #11

You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.

Turned 50 this year, coding every day although my job includes loads of other stuff as well. One of the advantages of having 35 years of coding and engineering experience is that it's easier to judge the value of "innovations" in the field.

Its also quite depressing when everyone is jumping to the latest fads when they are often an inferior solution.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#144

Post by lakkal »

santaclaus wrote: post #15
vemv wrote: post #11

You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.

> You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. Why not? One of my favorite coworkers ever was over 50 and he still seemed to very much enjoy coding.

Just to add to the chorus, I turned 50 a few months ago, and still enjoy coding for a living.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#145

Post by alex-yo »

wott wrote: post #108
alex-yo wrote: post #26

Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work for the next 30 years to retire. However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job. And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point…

> And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money. Same (a bit older now but it started at the same age). I don't care about the salary: it is always more money that I can spend while working, and at the same time I am not going to get from any honest job the kind of money needed to do what I'd like . The only time I got an interview, the guy wanted me to fill a leader/mana…

During one of my interviews, a couple of years ago, I heard something like "Oh, you're over 30, and you were not a manager yet? Look, I have lots of CVs of people at your age, who are managers. If you are not, then it seems like your employer was thinking that there is something wrong with you. That's why we won't go with you further in the process".

I was arguing that in my previous job I was in fact a technical team leader, I was spending half of each day on showing people how to use databases, I was organizing trainings and conference talks. I just didn't get the job of course.

The most frustrating thing I experience now is that companies don't want to have a programmer in my age. And I cannot be a manager "because you don't have any experience in managing people".

That's sad, frustrating and depressing. Especially that I'm looking for a job now.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#146

Post by clifanatic »

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #9

The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys" so you either migrate to management (whi…

> looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecessary

Well, I know that you were just throwing out a random example, but... I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Angular and React. They're actually pretty good, pretty clever solutions to some of the problems the plague web application developers, and help us get a long way to a flexible web environment. Even Node.js may seem "wrong" to those of us whose first experience with a computer was a command-line terminal, but people were saying that Java on the server side was unrealistic 15 years ago. And really, there is a benefit to using the same language on the server as on the client, especially as those two drift closer and closer together.

The problem I see is that the "new devs" (and their 20-year-old "startup founder" bosses) assume that Angular, React and NodeJS, being the new, trendy, hip thing, is all there is and all you need to know. As long as you know those fairly well, the thinking goes, you don't need to know anything about TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, bash, signals, processes, threads... all the things that us old fogeys have spent decades wrestling with. I recently watched a (much younger) colleague of mine reject a candidate because he was misusing the term "route". I asked "you mean like a TCP source route? That's not really that relevant to the UI position he was interviewing for." He seemed incredulous that I didn't "know" that "route" was an "industry-standard" term for a URL (apparently that's what Node.js's Express framework calls URLs - hint, the term "route" never appears in RFC 2616, which actually specifies HTTP). THAT mentality is the frustrating one, and it's all over the place.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#149

Post by marmot777 »

That's absurd. Most other industries, people get some respect for experience. I'd understand not hiring someone who had not kept up but people of any age can stop learning. If someone's on top of things, why would their age have anything to do with the hiring decision? Not being "into" the same things is flat out childish.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#150

Post by noddingham »

JPKab wrote: post #98
rdtsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other…

It's a weird situation, because I was working remotely for a tech company and was required to move to the Boulder, CO area recently. It's an awesome company and I was stoked about the area, so I went ahead and did it, but the requirement for collocation that has been driven by certain management ethos' is odd in such a technology driven world. The advantages I've had by moving from Arkansas to here have been numerous…

As someone that also works in Boulder, is your compensation enough to allow you to actually live in Boulder?
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