Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by bigtex » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

norea-armozel wrote: post #88

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…

If I could get a reliable car so I could get to a metro when I needed to see an endocrinologist I would definitely do my work remotely from a rural community. I know that parts of Kansas have FTTH (it's not gigabit but it's reliable and has no datacaps) which are very cheap to live in. Edit: It looks like Nex-Tech now offers gigabit internet. It's around $200 a month with cable and phone but to be fair it's rural Kan…

I have business class internet in a rural community in Tx. Advertised speed in 10/2 but I usually get around 20/2 for $100/month. It is fixed wireless.

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

#202

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

danielvinson wrote: post #87

makecheck wrote: post #56

I think that age is correlation, not causation. What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like paying people lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is causing months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products. When your organization is under…

This matches my experiences well. Many of the people I know who are devs in the Bay Area that don't work at Google/FB aren't making more than $80k. The companies pull in grads who couldn't quite make the top companies who don't realize that they will never get a raise or promotion, and many of these people stay for 5-6 years before they realize how hard they are getting screwed. These companies would NEVER hire an ol…

> These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they know they wouldn't be able to retain them.

Not only that, but they don't have to retain them. . There is a large supply of "~20 year olds who aren't quite Google material" lined up to take on those $80K developer roles. The "churn and burn" strategy seems to be working for these companies so why change?

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

#203

Post by bigtex » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

darrmit wrote: post #114

tjic wrote: post #2

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…

I work from home four days a week and commute one day - usually around 2 hours round trip. I get paid less at this job than I would if I was willing to commute to the city where my office is located. But I consider the mental and emotional benefit of not having that daily grind to be worth more than the wage gap. I greatly prefer to slow pace of country life after a day working, whether at home or in the office. The…

This is my same exact scenario as well. I have free range animals and occasionally a rooster will be right next to my office window and start crowing while on a call. I could make much more if I took a job in the city but that would be a 2 hour commute everyday. I get to have lunch with my family 4 days a week.

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

#204

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:57 PM UTC

polartx wrote: post #171

makecheck wrote: post #56

I think that age is correlation, not causation. What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like paying people lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is causing months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products. When your organization is under…

>I think that age is correlation, not causation. Agreed. I started working in tech when I was 22--now I'm over 30. I've never witnessed old-age discrimination. What I have witnessed are start-ups, built on newer tech, (AWS over on-prem, nosql over relational, etc), passing on candidates whose last reference book was the Data Warehouse Toolkit and still want to be called WebMasters. The law of the tech industry is whe…

There is a difference (both in terms of perceived and actual value) between "never stop learning" and constantly being on the language/framework-of-the-year treadmill.

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

#205

Post by Animats » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

highd wrote: post #86

daxfohl wrote: post #75

Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. In other words, "having experience in the industry". Or "domain-specific knowledge" Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle. These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you a…

I wouldn't say "teens using snapchat" is "the industry", I would say it is "a industry". If you look at the S&P 500, a tiny fraction of the companies there are "social media", and even software-only companies are a small fraction. The social web startup is sexy still because of the romanticism of the Zuckerberg-dorm-room-hacking-to-$B story, but it's a relatively insignificant component of the economy. Jet engines an…

That's almost over. Look at YC's latest crop of companies. Only about two are ad-supported.

Right now, Facebook and Google are more than half the online ad industry, and that fraction is increasing. There's a network effect - ad space buyers only need to deal with Facebook and Google; beyond that it's not worth the trouble. Twitter doesn't have enough market share and is still losing money. Instagram exited by selling to Facebook. Snapchat and Pinterest are still standalone, privately held, and may not be profitable.

We're back to having to make stuff that customers will pay for. That's a good thing.

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

#206

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #180

beachstartup wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial. anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

Why?

Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

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

#207

Post by Animats » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #175

employee8000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40 is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology. I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed ano…

Note: JSON is just like XML in that it's a horrible data interchange format ;) And if "knowing JSON" is a key skill you interview for... You possibly might want to ask different questions. Unless you repeatedly build the same thing - see below. Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do that , you have a rea…

JSON is really just like S-expressions, of course. It's trees all the way down.

(At least until you have to process so much XML that you have to do it sequentially, rather than parse it into a tree in memory.)

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

#208

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

It's a difficult balance and requires judgment and luck. If you're constantly on the "new language/framework" treadmill, you're wasting a lot of cycles learning fads that won't last, for the N% chance of learning something that ends up big. On the other hand if you stick with refining your knowledge of what you know, you risk getting left in the past. Need both kinds of learning.

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

#209

Post by mhurron » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #133

drdeadringer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mhurron has a valid point and it is worth considering beyond him//her "doing a great job so far" being "miserable and ineffective".

I downvoted mhurron, I found it a fatalistic response that isn't constructive or helpful. Even if you feel you don't know anyone, you have to put effort in to meeting people. Here's three ways I got remote work before I knew anyone: * I emailed a band I liked whose song was featured as Demo Of The Month in a magazine, asking to buy all their CDs. We kept in touch, and months later they asked me for some (free) advice…

> That's what worked for me anyway.

Therefore it works for everyone.

There are lots of people that do not make friends easily. There are lots of people that do not have friends in the industry that they work in. There are lots of people that have moved very far away from any friends once or many times in the past few years and have either completely lost contact or don't have friends that would be in any position to throw other contacts your way.

So no, it is not just go make friends and everything will be great.

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

#210

Post by pacomerh » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

marxama wrote: post #59

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…

No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge difference.

So you're saying you post your age in your profile?. This has no correlation